A hundred years hence : the expectations of an optimist

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(Staus Aurccfeela HTuna-

A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

Crown 8vo, cloth, 68.

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

Essays written in Time of Tranquillity

BY

C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.A.,
Author of " From the Abyss."

" Mr Masterman has a singular gift for correlating
widely different phenomena, and is always quick to
discern the inner significance of literary and other
fashions. He attempts to describe the tendencies of
English civilisation, to estimate the nature of its
dominant ideals, and to point out recent changes
which have occurred in these, the nature of the
foundation upon which they rest, and the likelihood
of catastrophes in the future. . . . The book is
clever, interesting, useful. . . . We welcome its
appearance." — A thenteum.

" All who care to make acquaintance with one of
the new forces of which the twentieth century will
see the victory or the defeat will do well to read ' In
Peril of Change.' "—Westminster Gazette.

" The essays are of high literary quality, vigorous,
yet unaggressive ; just in appreciation and sym-
pathetic in treatment. One cannot overpraise such
stimulating and thoughtful work as Mr Master-
man's. ... It is a good thing for a man to think,
but it is better still to make others think, and this is
exactly what ' In Peril of Change' does." — Daily
Telegraph,

" Let everyone who wants to read quickening and
suggestive ideas on modern problems and principles
buy the book, for whether the reader agrees or dis-
agrees he is compelled to think." — Ftell Mall
Gazette.

LONDON : T. FISHER UNWIN

A HUNDRED
YEARS HENCE

ZTbe Expectations of an ©ptimist

By

T. BARON RUSSELL

Author of
"A Guardian of the Poor," "The Mandate," etc.

*~AJrt

OF THE

UNIVERSi

Of

LONDON

T. Fisher Unwin

Paternoster Square

1905

., ,,r.

There is a history in all men's lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased ;
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life ; which in their seeds
And weak beginnings lie intreasured.

SHAKESPEARE, 2 Henry /f7., III. i.

They pass through whirl-pools, and deep woes do shun,
Who the event weigh, 'ere the action's done.

WEBSTER, Duchess of Malfi, II. 4.

All Rights Reserved

PREFACE

THE following was at first intended to be no more
than an attempt to foresee the probable trend of
mechanical invention and scientific discovery during
the present century. But as the work took shape
it was seen to involve a certain amount of what may
be called moral conjecture, since the material pro-
gress of the new age could not very well be imagined
without taking into account its mental characteristics.
In these expectations of an optimist, a great ethical
improvement of the civilised human race has been
anticipated, and a rate of progress foreseen which
perhaps no previous writers have looked for. Both
in regard to moral development and material pro-
gress, it has been the aim of the author to predict
nothing that the tendencies of existing movement do
not justify us in expecting.

An attempt of this kind is exposed to facile criticism.
It will be easy for objectors to signalise this or that
expected invention as beyonc} scientific possibility,
that or the other moral reform as fit only for Utopia.
But those who will consent to perpend the enormous
and utterly unforeseen advance of the nineteenth
century will recognise the danger of limiting their
anticipations concerning the possibilities of the
twenty-first. A fanciful description in (I think)
Addison's Spectator of an invention by which the
movements of an indicator on a lettered dial were
imagined to be reproduced on a similar dial at a

167190

vi PREFACE

distance, and employed as a means of communication,
must have seemed wholly chimerical to its readers ;
and even as recently as fifty years ago, anyone who
predicted the telephone would have been laughed at.
When the principle of the accumulator was already
discovered a very competent practical electrician told
the writer that he need not worry himself much
about the idea : there was not the least likelihood that
electricity could ever be " bottled up in cisterns " !
On the whole there is more likelihood of error in
timidity than in boldness when we attempt to foresee
what will be attained after the increasingly rapid
movement of scientific progress during this twentieth
century shall have gathered full force.

For the rest, criticism of this sort is disarmed,
because the reader has been in any case invited to
enter a realm of more or less pure imagination. No
one can exactly know with what births, monstrous
or beautiful, the future may teem. Admitting a
certain point of view — that of almost unrestrained
optimism — the predictions here offered will, it is
believed, be found to be along the line of existing
progress.

BEAUFORT HOUSE,
BRENTFORD.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PA6K

I. THE RATE OF PROGRESS i

II. HOUSING, TRAVEL AND POPULATION.

QUESTIONS . . . .13

III. THE MAN OF BUSINESS . 38

IV. THE CULT OF PLEASURE . -54

V. THE NEWSPAPER OF THE FUTURE AND THE

FUTURE OF THE NEWSPAPER . . 68

VI. UTILISING THE SEA . . . -95

VII. THE MARCH OF SCIENCE . . . 106

VIII. EDUCATION A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE . 134

IX. RELIGION: THE FINE ARTS, LITERATURE . 175

X. THE AGE OF ECONOMIES . . . 205

XI. THE LAW A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE . 233

XII. CONCLUSIONS .... 286

INDEX ..... 309

vij

A Hundred Years Hence

CHAPTER I

THE RATE OF PROGRESS

To anyone who has considered at all attentively
the enormous material advances of the nine-
teenth century, a much more remarkable thing
than any invention or improvement which that
century brought forth must be the speed of
human progression during the hundred years
between 1800 and 1900, and the extraordinary
acceleration of that speed which began to
establish itself about the year 1880. But in-
deed, during the whole century, our forward
movement was steadily gaining impetus. The
difference between the state of the world in
1700 and its state in 1800 is insignificant com-
pared with the differences established between
the latter date and the opening of the twentieth
century. But it is hardly less insignificant than
the progress of the decade 1800-1810 compared
with that of the decade 1890-1900. We are,
in fact, picking up speed at an enormous rate.

2 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

The beginning of the twenty-first century will
exhibit differences, when compared with our
own day, which even the boldest imagination
can hardly need to be restrained in conjecturing.
The latter part of the nineteenth century was
the age of electricity, just as the middle part
was the age of steam. The first part of the
twentieth century is evidently going to be the
age of wave manipulation, of which wireless
telegraphy, as we know it, is but the first in-
fantile stirring.

What the developments promised (and they
are already quite easily presageable) by wire-
less telegraphy will give us, and what they will
be superseded by, can only be very dimly
imagined ; what their effects will be upon the
human race in itself no one has yet ventured
even to hint at. Few things are more remark-
able in the numerous and highly-varied experi-
ments of vaticinatory fiction and more serious
efforts of prognostication than the utter absence
of any adequate attempt to forecast the future
of the race itself. Social and political changes,
the enormous differences which are certain
to be effected in the manner of human life,
have been from time to time more or less
boldly imagined, and a couple of volumes of
very able forecasts of the future have recently
been published by a writer of singular vision
and highly-trained scientific imagination. But
it does not hitherto appear to have been at all

THE RATE OF PROGRESS 3

fully perceived that the moral constitution of
man himself is quite certain to be profoundly
modified, not alone by the influence of a I'
material environment which will have been
changed as the environment of man has never
been changed since the first inhabitation of this
planet, but also by the steady development of
inward changes which have already begun to
manifest themselves. Since the year 1800
ideas which, so far as we have any means of
knowing, had been regarded as irrefragable
ever since man first began to think and to set
his thoughts upon record, have been utterly
shattered. One has only to compare the
opinions of even average thinkers of our own
day on such subjects as marriage, the status of
woman, and the education of children, with the
opinions, practically current without material
change since the dawn of history, in 1800, to
perceive the truth of this statement ; and the
change of attitude on the part of civilised
people, outside the Roman Catholic Church
(and, to some extent, even within it), towards
religion is not less remarkable. An en-
lightened man of the present day is so radically
different in all his ideas from a similar in-
dividual of the early nineteenth century, that it
is hardly possible for a modern student to write
with any intelligence on the deeper significance
of events and life prior to 1800. Grotesquely
inadequate as most historical novels of our own

4 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

day are, they are perhaps hardly less in-
adequate than our own understanding of the
novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott could
probably write of crusaders and the age of
chivalry without committing serious blunders
of sentiment. What the world thought in the
age of Saladin the world practically thought in
the age of Napoleon. But the irresistible in-
fection of modern ideas has made it hardly
possible for us to enter with any fulness into
the sentiments of Scott ; and the sentiments
put into the mouth, and the thoughts into the
mind, of the hero of any historical novel of our
own day would be utterly incomprehensible to
that hero, could he by some miracle be resusci-
tated, and could we translate them literally to
him. We unconsciously endow the personages
of our historical fiction with ideas for which
they had not even the names.

And the development of the human mind
proceeds apace. It will be even more difficult
for the ordinary cultured man of a hundred
years hence to form any full conception of our
ideas than it is for us to appraise the mental
attitude of the men of the eighteenth century.
To take a single example : the humanest warrior
of the Napoleonic wars appears a monster of
cruelty if compared with the sternest of modern
generals. Napoleon devastated provinces
without a word of censure from competent
critics of the art of war. A howl of execration

THE RATE OF PROGRESS 5

went up, not from continental Europe alone, at
the measures — seriously embarrassing to our
military operations, and enormously helpful to
our enemy — which the British generals took in
order to diminish the sufferings of the non-
combatant population of the Transvaal ; camps
of refuge, it appears, did not sufficiently excel
in comfort the hospitals of our own wounded !
And there is a section of the Press in this
country which still occasionally remembers, to
complain of it, the fact that our generals found
it necessary, for military reasons, to burn farm-
houses. I should not like to attempt the con-
jecture, what Wellington would have said in
answer to such a complaint, or what he would
have done to a self-appointed emissary who
visited his camps for the purpose of criticising
his action ! It would have been no more im-
possible for him to foresee the day of such
things, however, than it is for us to predict the
moral sense of the year 2000. The fact is that f\
we have greatly deteriorated in war, although,
or rather because, we have even more greatly
improved in morals and feeling. William %
Morris conceived of man in the coming time as

o

a sort of recreated mediaeval. Mr Wells con-
ceives him as practically a nineteenth-century
man, with his ideas merely adjusted to new
material conditions. Bellamy described him in
terms of a being inconceivable by any sort of
reason. No one appears to have seen that his

6 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

moral nature will have been not merely revolu-
tionised, but recreated, just as our own morality
has been recreated during the last hundred
years, not so much by the influence of material
environment or the march of invention, as by
the regeneration of human conscience.

In no way will the acceleration of the speed
of progress be more apparent than in the
thoughts and emotions of men. But to say
this is not to belittle the progress which science
and invention have in store for the new age.
In applying a sort of imaginative telescope to
the mental eye it will be necessary to keep con-
stantly in view the utter inconceivableness of
modern achievement by the civilised world of
the past. When electricity was no more than
a sort of scientific plaything — when notions of
its possible uses were (as in Davy's time) far
less substantially imagined than, for instance,
the possible uses of radium are to-day, even
scientific thinkers, endowed with what Huxley
so luminously applauded as scientific imagina-
tion, had no rudiment of the materials for con-
ceiving such inventions as the electric telegraph
— far less the possibilities of transmitted and
picked-up wave energy. And here, at the
beginning of wireless telegraphy, we are no less
in the dark as to what will develop from it
and what will supersede it. The nineteenth
century progressed, almost from first to last, on
the strength of the discovery of how to utilise

THE COAL AGE AND AFTER 7

the stored energy of coal, whether directly in
the steam engine or indirectly in the dynamo-
electric machine and the electric motor. With
the end of the coal age already well in view, we
can only conjecture what the sources of
mechanical power will be a hundred years
hence. Before we have quite exhausted our
coal measures and begun to draw more liberally
on our stores of petroleum, we shall no doubt
have abandoned altogether so wasteful a con-
trivance as the steam engine. There is a
clumsiness almost barbarous in the roundabout
employment of coal to produce heat, the steam
engine to utilise only a miserable fraction of
the potential energy even of the part of the
coal which we do not fatuously allow to escape
as smoke ; of the dynamo to use up a part of
the motion yielded by the steam engine in pro-
ducing electricity (while a small but recognis-
able portion of that motion is converted
wastefully back again into heat), and of the
electro-motor to re-convert the electricity into
motion, heat, light and chemical energy,
according to our requirements. It cannot be
many years before we learn to use coal far more
economically than we do nowadays, abolishing
the furnace and the steam engine, and obtain-
ing electricity directly from coal itself by some
sort of electro-chemical decomposition. But
even so, our coal will not last much longer.
The speed of our progress will exhaust it much

8 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

sooner than most people imagine, and probably
in another twenty-five years the end of our
petroleum will also begin to be looked forward
to with apprehension.

About this period, or perhaps immediately
after, progress will have been accelerated to
an enormous degree by the invention of some
new method of decomposing water. The
economical analysis of water into its two
component gases, whose chemical affinity and
antipodal electrical attractions are already
utilised to some extent in such appliances as
the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe and electrical
storage batteries, is a secret capable of extra-
ordinary beneficences to the new age. By
burning hydrogen in oxygen we can already
produce the greatest heat practically needed in
the arts ; the electric furnace only superseding
this process because it happens to be more
manageable. But when we want oxygen and
hydrogen, we do not, in practice, now obtain
them from water : we only combine them as
water in the act of utilisation. The rational
line of progress is obviously to seek means of
directly decomposing water. When we can
do this compendiously and economically we
shall have an inexhaustible supply of energy
— for water thus used is not destroyed as
water, as coal is destroyed, qua coal, when we
utilise its stored energy. The very act of
utilising the gases recombines them : and we

THE COAL AGE AND AFTER 9

can use them thus for the production of almost
every kind of energy that man at present needs.
We can use them for heat by burning them
together. We can use them for light by burn-
ing them in the presence of any substance
capable of being made incandescent. We
shall be able to use them to generate electricity
by some sort of contrivance akin to the
accumulator of the present day (a highly
rudimentary invention) ; and it would be even
now a very simple matter to utilise their
explosive recombination for the direct produc-
tion of power as motion. Utilised apart, the
constituent gases of water have many other
uses and possible uses. Hydrogen, under
suitable treatment, yields the greatest obtain-
able cold, as oxygen and hydrogen together
yield the greatest heat. If our flying-machines
need a sort of ballast to reinforce their
mechanical lifting apparatus, hydrogen is the
best possible assistant. And the probable uses
of oxygen are yet more numerous. So long
as we still burn anything at all except a
mixture of oxygen and hydrogen — and
ultimately we shall have nothing else left to
burn — oxygen is capable of multiplying the
efficiency of all combustion. One of the
greatest problems of our own day is the dis-
posal of waste products of all sorts — the
sources of inconvenience, disease and dirt.
Oxygen, if readily and copiously obtainable, is

10 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

capable of destroying them all. Indeed, it
seems likely that medicine, the least progressive
of the sciences to-day, will find in oxygen the
great propulsive force of its forward move-
ment. In considerably less than a hundred
years hence such makeshifts as drugging, and
the fighting of one disease by the instalment
in the organism of another, will certainly have
gone by the board. Antisepsis and Asepsis
(the latter almost infinitely the greatest inven-
tion in the history of therapeutics) will have
pushed their way from surgery into medicine.
There are numerous diseases which can be
not merely cured, but ultimately abolished
when we have once discovered how to use
oxygen adequately. The readjustment of the
conditions of life determined by the removal
from the civilised world of the greater number
of diseases, and perhaps of all diseases except
those arising out of wilful misconduct (as im-
proper diet) and even by the elimination of
most of the evils of hurry and overwork (for
what are medically and chemically known
as fatigue products can almost certainly be
eliminated from the system by the proper use,
yet to be discovered, of oxygen) must in-
evitably have an enormous influence not
merely upon the physical life of man, but also,
and even more, upon his mental constitution.
The rate of progress will thus in yet another
way be vastly accelerated.

ELECTRICITY AND AFTER 11

Most likely the universal source of power,
then, before the middle of the century, will be
the recomposition of water — in other words, we
shall get all the power we want by splitting
up water into oxygen and hydrogen, and then
allowing those gases to recombine, thereby
returning to us the energy we have employed
in the analysis. How we shall employ this
power is largely for the future to decide, and
certainly in the earlier future we shall employ
it in the generation of etheric waves of various
kinds. The world of science is visibly on the
threshold of new and revolutionary discoveries
on the nature and composition of matter, and
whither these discoveries will lead us it is not
usefully possible to conjecture. But certainly,
after the usual incubation period of a scientific
discovery — when it is merely a sort of wonder-
ful toy, as argon and radium are at present —
there will come the practical men, suckled at
the large and noble breasts of disinterested,
unremunerative truth, and ready to turn that
nutriment into world-moving material useful-
ness : so, again, the rate of progress will receive
a vast and valuable acceleration. Electricity,
whose gift to the world has been so great,
will probably not, until after several decades,
approach the limits of its realm, and so long
as electricity remains a considerable element
in the utilisation of those stores of dissipating
energy by which the planet lives, it is possible

12 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

to foresee something of what will become of
man during the next age.

We have here the limits of such an inquiry
as the present. Placing the end of the age
of electricity at provisionally about a hundred
years hence (but it is quite conceivable that
the rate of progress may overtake it earlier
and shut the door on conjecture) it is possible
to forecast, not indeed with certainty, but with
a measure of imaginative probability, what will
happen as the resources of electricity are
developed and the other material amenities of
the world are worked along the line of natural
progress. So far as the light of analogy can
point the way the reader is invited on a sort
of conjectural journey. Of the developments
of the moral ideas of man likely to be deter-
mined, not so much by the coming change in
his material environment, as by the evolution
of inner forces already at work, I propose to
say something at the end of the book. In
the meantime, the probable material changes
in the next hundred years (or less, according
to the rate of our progress) in various depart-
ments of life will be the subject of some inter-
mediate conjectures.

CHAPTER II

HOUSING, TRAVEL AND POPULATION QUESTIONS

WHEN every allowance has been made for the
material changes which the progress of this
century threatens, it is easy to see that certain^
present-day problems" will continue to trouble
our successors. Some things which perplex
ourselves will, I think, work out their own
remedy. Others will remain the subject of
solutions not difficult to be imagined in
advance.

One chief difficulty which will infallibly con-
front the immediate future, and even the future
that is more remote, arises out of the simple
fact that the race of man tends to increase
numerically at a speed greater than our de-
vices for its accommodation can quite con-
veniently cope with. The population of the
world not only increases, but increases at
compound interest. Nor is this all. Improved
sanitation, better habits of life, and the progress
of medicine, prolong lives that in the conditions
of last century would have been shortened, and
the rate of increase is thus further accelerated,

14 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

as individuals who in different conditions would
have died, live on, perhaps reproducing their
species, and thus intensifying the population
problem. Against these influences may be set
the effect of the restrictions imposed by some
civilised peoples on the birth rate, which
Mr Roosevelt calls " race suicide." These
practices, just now increasingly prevalent, retard
the rate of increase, but do not at present stop
our increase : they alleviate, but do not cure
the difficulty of over-population. Artificial
physiological checks on population, if I am right
in certain other conjectures to be presently
developed, will not form part of the permanent
morality of the new age, partly because, with
more enlightenment, they will be voluntarily
abandoned or superseded, and partly because
the necessity for them will have disappeared,
having worked out its own cure.

But with all this it would be folly to antici-
pate that the population of the civilised world
will not have greatly increased before the end
of the period contemplated by the present
inquiry : and this brings us face to face with
two very important questions — those of
housing and transport. Where shall we live,
and how shall we move from place to place —
above all, how shall we proceed from home to
the scene of work and thence home again every
day, in the future ? Shall we indeed thus
move back and forth at all ?

THE HOUSE OF THE FUTURE 15

The answer to the last question bifurcates
somewhat. In the earlier future of (say) twenty
or thirty years hence, probably the greatest
tendencies will be towards concentration on
the one hand and exceedingly rapid transport
on the other. What the ultimate practice will
be, it should not be difficult to guess when we
see how these tendencies are likely to work
themselves out.

During the last twenty-five or thirty years
of the nineteenth century the tendency of
workers in great cities was more and more
towards suburban life, men travelling to and
from the cities in increasing numbers, to in-
creasing distances, and at increasing speeds.
Even mechanics, even labourers and the other
humbler wage-earners (to say nothing of clerks
not earning much more, but spending their
money in a different manner) nowadays travel
considerable distances to their work. But in
spite of what is complacently regarded (by
railway and tramway directors) as rapid con-
veyance, there is lately manifest an increasing
impatience against the time subtracted from
men's leisure by the two daily journeys, an
impatience very naturally increased in the case
of manual workers of both sexes by the utter
inadequacy of the legislative control imposed
upon railway and tramway companies.

Crowded trams and trains, with desperate
men and weak women fighting a daily battle for

16 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

conveyance before all the cheap trips have been
made, inflict a shameful degradation upon the
class for which Parliament makes illusory pro-
vision in railway and tramway Acts. As a
consequence of this difficulty, and also because
of the early hour at which the companies are
allowed to cease carrying working-folk at the
workmen's fare, many men and women are
compelled to waste some hours of their scanty
leisure every day between the arrival of their
trains and the opening of their workshops, a
cruelty for which the blame may be pretty
equally apportioned to Parliament and the com-
pany directors. The result of it is that many
of the poor prefer the evil of overcrowding in
cities before the greater evil of wasted time and
degrading travel. As time goes on, no doubt
the monopolists of transportation will be com-
pelled, as their own necessities increase and
so bring them under the hand of the legislature,
to serve more adequately the necessities of the
majority. But even so, and as long as the
effective speed of conveyance is limited by the
lack of permanent- way space and the necessity
for frequent stations, the impatience even now
manifested, and manifested chiefly by the class
which suffers least from loss of time in travel,
will lead to concentration. Taking London as
an example, it may be said that the Victorian
age was the age of the suburbs. But few
people now live in the suburbs of London who

THE HOUSE OF THE FUTURE 17

can afford to live anywhere else. Either they
move right out into the country, seeking a spot
on some main line where the greater distance
and less-frequent train service is made up for
by speedy and uninterrupted journeys ; or
they come into London and occupy houses or
flats within easy reach of their working head-
quarters. The suburbs are given over to those
who cannot afford either of these expedients,
or who, having been brought up there, are
retained by a sort of inertia. Ultimately, as
the demand for town space becomes intensified,
two things will happen. First of all, the
restrictions which many cities, ignoring the
freedom of New York and Chicago, impose
upon the erection of excessively high buildings,
will go by the board. The shutting out of
sunlight and fresh air will be the subject of
compensations to be presently explained, and
thirty, forty, fifty or a hundred-storey houses,
and houses which perhaps burrow to some
distance underground, will, by virtue of the
same compensations, house a vast, concentrated
population impatient of daily travel. As the
demand for homes increases, and even the
high buildings cannot cope with it, the cities
will push their way outwards, repopulating the
rebuilt suburbs. This kind of thing will have
a tendency to correct itself. Rents will be
high in proportion to position near the centre.
But a limit of toleration will be reached, and as

18 A HUNDRED YEAIIS HENCE

certain improvements will have been effected
in transport, there will ultimately be a reaction,
and people will again go right out to the
country, as long as there is any country left.
Before discussing these improvements, how-
ever, it will be convenient to examine the con-
veniences, social and sanitary, of the homes of
the new age. The greatest convenience of
all, no doubt, will be the modification and
partial elimination of the domestic servant.
There is every reason to believe that the
great difficulties of the servant question as at
present experienced will solve themselves,
forming in part an instance of the moral
changes, accompanying material invention but
only partly resulting from it, which the new
age is certain to experience. It is usual to
lay the blame of the unsatisfactory character
and atrocious inefficiency of the domestic
servants of our own day on the institution
of free education. They are much more due
to the absence of any education worthy of the
name, and to the imperfect civilisation of
modern houses. Thirty-five years or so are
but an instant in the life of an institution so
overwhelmingly more important in its possi-
bilities than any other subject of legislation
as State-compelled education of the people.
No one appears to have recognised that
character - making, which Herbert Spencer
called the most important object which can

I

THE SERVANT QUESTION 19

engage the attention of the legislator, is the
only true object of education, free or other-
wise. When politicians have talked of the
necessity of national education, the argument
they have used was that Germans are better
chemists than we are. When they praised the
usefulness of modern languages it was in terms
of commercial utility. " Modern languages,
in fact" (a recent critic remarked), "make a
good bagman." It is inept to despair of free
education because free education has produced
no very satisfactory results while conceived
of as a process of shoving undesired knowledge
into the children of the poor. Looking, as
everyone not hidebound by pessimism must
look, for a great enlightenment of the law-giving
class when the system of party politics, already
beginning to show signs of decay, has ceased
to hold all legislation in its blighting hand, we
have every reason to expect that the true uses
of education will be perceived and attained
long before the end of the period contemplated
when we speak of the new age. And then,
one very great factor in the servant question
will have been satisfactorily solved, even if
other conditions have not conducted us nearly
all the way to the solution beforehand.

For, while making every allowance for the
evil effects of education, wrongly conceived
and improperly administered, on the character
of women destined to become servants, it must

20 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

be allowed that much of what we call the
servant difficulty could be cured now, and
will unquestionably be cured before long, by
inventions capable of abolishing the grievances
which lead to it. These grievances are real
and remediable. I do not refer to the con-
finement, restraint and gross lack of con-
sideration on the part of employers which
lead young women of the class from which
servants are drawn to prefer labour in factories
and elsewhere, in conditions far less comfort-
able, before domestic service ; but to our utter
lack of ingenuity in removing the irksomeness
and degradation of much domestic labour.
Some coming inventions calculated to improve
the lot of Mary Jane will now be described.

In the first place (as Mr H. G. Wells has
pointed out, without apparently being aware
that buildings already exist in which some
of his ideas have been anticipated), modern
rooms, equally with those of all time, seem to
have been constructed so as to make it as
difficult as possible to keep them clean.
Square corners and rectangular junctions of
wall and floor, wall and ceiling, will certainly
before long be replaced everywhere by curves.
But the work of house cleaning will be
rendered easy and unlaborious by another
invention, already indeed in existence on a
large scale, but eventually capable of being
rendered portable. I mean a contrivance for

A CLEAN AGE 21

applying a vacuum to any desired spot. There
is a very ingenious but rather noisy engine
already in use for pumping the dust out of
carpets, curtains and furniture. In the houses
of the future handy contrivances of various
shapes, all independent of any engine, will
be found, furnished with elastic nozzles on
the outside and with some sort of appliance
capable of instantly exhausting the air within.
Such a utensil wheeled over the floor will
remove instantly every particle of dust from
the surface and below the surface of the
carpet, at the same time picking up any such
ddbris as scraps of paper, pins, and other
decidua of the previous day. A similar in-
strument, differently shaped, will clean the
curtains, supposing curtains to be still in use
at the time, and will dust the chairs and tables
— though there will not be anything like so
much dust as there is now, nearly all kinds
of combustion being abolished. The kitchen
fire will of course be an electric furnace: "oj
my word we'll not carry coals." Lighting will
all be electric, and no doubt wireless. The
abolition of horse traffic in cities, and the use
of the vacuum apparatus which will be con-
tinuously at work in all streets, keeping them
dry and free from mud, will practically remove
the necessity for boot brushing, even supposing
that we shall still wear boots : every man and
woman in dressing will pass a vacuum instru-

22 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

ment over his and her clothes and get rid of
even the little dust existing — for we shall be
more and more intolerant of dirt in any form,
having by that time fully realised how dangerous
dirt is. The new age will be a clean age.
A lady of the year 2000 who could be miracu-
lously transported back to London at the
present moment would probably faint (they
will not have ceased fainting) at the intolerable
disgustingness of what is, I suppose, now one
of the cleanest cities in the world, even if the
cruelty of employing horses for traction, and
the frightful recklessness of allowing them to
soil the streets in which people walk, did
not overpower her susceptibilities in another
way.

Cooking will perhaps not be done at all on
any large scale at home, in flat-homes at all
events ; and in any case, for reasons which will
hereafter become apparent, cooking will be a
much less disgusting process than it is to-day.
In no case will the domestic servant of a
hundred years hence be called upon to stand
over a roaring fire, laid by herself, and to be
cleaned up by herself when done with, in order
to cook the family dinner. Every measure of
heat — controllable in gradations of ten degrees
or so — will be furnished in electrically-fitted
receptacles, with or without water jackets or
steam jackets : and unquestionably all cooking
will j|be done in hermetically-closed vessels.

A CLEAN AGE 23

We shall not much longer do most of our cook-
ing by such a wasteful and unwholesome method
as boiling, whereby the important soluble salts
of nearly all food are callously thrown away.
As, for reasons to be developed hereafter, it is
quite certain that animal food will have been
wholly abandoned before the end of this century,
the debris of the kitchen will be much more
manageable than at present, and the kitchen
sink will cease to be, during a great part of the
day, a place of unapproachable loathsomeness.
On the other hand, its conveniences will have
been greatly increased. It is difficult to under-
stand how the old-world fashion of (for in-
stance) <c washing up" plates and dishes can
have endured so long. Of course, in the new
age, these utensils will be simply dropped one
by one into an automatic receptacle ; swilled
clean by water delivered with force and charged
with nascent oxygen ; dried by electric heat ;
and polished by electric force ; being finally
oxygen-bathed as a superfluous act of sanitary
cleanliness before being sent to table again.
And all that has come off the plates will drop
through the scullery floor into the destructor
beneath to be oxygenated and made away
with.

Here we have most of the distasteful
elements of domestic service got rid of.
Naturally lifts of various kinds, driven by the
same force (whatever it is) which lights and

24 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

warms the house, will be everywhere in evi-
dence. The plan of attaining the upper part of
a small house by climbing, on every occasion,
a sort of wooden hill, covered with carpet of
questionable cleanliness, will of course have
been abandoned : it is doubtful whether stair-
cases will be built at all after the next two or
three decades. And it is likely that the more
refined sentiment of the new age will recoil
before the spectacle of menial service at the
table. Not because they will despise, but be-
cause they will respect, their domestic assistants,
hostesses will dislike to have their guests
waited upon in a servile manner during meals
by plush-breeched flunkeys of the male, or
neat-handed Phyllises of the female, sex. Well-
arranged houses will have the kitchen on a
level with the dining-room, and the dividing
wall will be so contrived that a table, ready laid
at each course, can be made to slide through it
into the presence of the seated guests. An
immense amount of running to and fro between
kitchen and dining-room, and of lifting food
and table-ware into and out of elevators, will
thus be obviated, to the vast gastronomic
improvement of the meal and the salvation of
servants' time,

Naturally the bedrooms of the new age
will have many amenities lacking to our own.
It is not too much to anticipate that we shall
have learned enough of plumbing to be able to

BEDROOMS A.D. 2000 25

connect baths, wash-basins and other necessary
fittings with the drains without poisoning our-
selves, and the inconvenient modern " wash-
stand " with its unreticent adjuncts will decently
disappear. It cannot be very long — probably
it will only be a few years — before some kind
of reasonable control is exercised over the
technical education of plumbers.1

Thus the bedroom of the new age will be
a much more convenient and satisfactory
apartment than the one we slept in last night,
and another irksome and unelevating part of
the domestic work of our servants will be
eliminated. But the sleeping-apartments, and
indeed all apartments in city homes, will
contain yet another very valuable and neces-
sary article of furniture — the oxygenator.
Nearly all the unhealthiness and the pinched,
weary greyness of town-dwellers to-day could
be cured by fresh air. Everyone is familiar
with the improvement which can be effected in
the health and appearance of a city family
by even a short visit to the seaside or the
country — an improvement which it happens to
be fashionable just now to attribute, in the

1 Drains, it might be supposed, would disappear alto-
gether from the scheme of things in favour of some kind
of destructors. For reasons connected with a more en-
lightened view than we have yet reached of certain aspects
of terrestrial economy, however, I think they will, with
modifications, still exist.

26 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

former case, to the presence of ozone in the
sea air. The fact that holiday-makers are able
to endure the smell of slowly-decaying seaweed
with a dash of putrescent fish about it, which
is called " sea-air," without injury, and even to
pick up health in the presence of it, is more
due to the absence of carbon dioxide and other
deleterious gases of the towns than to anything
else. The beneficent effects of country air
are practically all due to the power possessed
by green vegetation of superoxygenating the
surrounding air. The atmosphere of cities, or
at all events of city homes, will presently be
freed from the products of combustion and
respiration, and endowed with a slightly-
increased proportion of oxygen, by artificial
means. And especially in bedrooms, rendered
to-day stuffy and unhealthy by the idiotic fear
of night air which an effete tradition has handed
down to us, will this reform be in evidence.
Prudent people to-day insist on large bedroom
windows — preferably of the French - door
pattern — and keep them wide open all night.
But this is attended by inconveniences in cold
and wet weather ; and while our grandchildren
will still keep their windows open all night in
all weathers, they will not be content with this
alone. There will be a chemical apparatus
hidden away in some corner, or; built into the
wall, which will absorb carbon dioxide and at
the same time slowly give off a certain amount

FUTURE TRAVEL 27

of oxygen — just enough to raise the oxygena-
tion of the air to the standard of the best
country places. And similar appliances will
be at work in the streets of our cities, so that
town air will be just as wholesome, just as
tonic and invigorating, as country air. If the
theory that the presence of ozone (that is,
allotropic oxygen) in the sea air is beneficent
stand the test of time, no doubt ozonators will
form part of these appliances : but in any case,
as the high buildings of the new age will
keep out the sunlight, electric light, carrying
all the ray-activity of sunlight, and just as
capable of fostering life and vegetation, will
serve the streets. Thus, so far as hygiene
goes, town life will be on a par with country
life : but many people will prefer the country,
and means will have to be provided to render
homes in the country compatible with work in
the cities. This brings us to the question of
transport.

I do not think that people will, within the
next hundred years at all events, travel to and
from work in flying-machines. But no doubt
the system of railway transport will be revolu-
tionised. What makes suburban travel so
slow is, not so much lack of speed on the part
of the trains, as the necessity for frequent
stoppage. You cannot satisfactorily run a
train at sixty miles an hour and stop it every
minute or so : otherwise sixty miles an hour

28 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

would be quite fast enough, for some decades
at least, to satisfy all requirements of suburban
traffic, though it would be, and indeed is,
ridiculously inadequate for long - distance
travelling. The expense of increased per-
manent-way hampers railway management,
and as there is no possibility of getting more
land to increase the number of available tracks,
some method will have to be devised for run-
ning one train over the top of another — perhaps
to the height of several storeys, not necessarily
provided with supporting rails : for we may
very conceivably have discovered means by
which vehicles can be propelled above the
ground in some kind of guide-ways, doing
away with the great loss of power caused by
wheel friction ; that is to say, the guides will
direct, but not support, the carriages. The
clumsy device of locomotive engines will have
been dispensed with. Whatever power is em-
ployed to drive the trains of the next century
will certainly be conveyed to them from central
power-houses.

But, as the reader has been already re-
minded, it is the stoppages which are so
wasteful of time on a suburban railway : and
they are also wasteful of force. Now in all
respects the new age will be economical.
One thing that will have to be perfected is the
art of getting up speed. Look, as you go
home to-night, at the way your train gathers

FUTURE TRAVEL 29

speed on leaving a station. Observe what a
long time it is before it can attain its full
velocity. A large part of the total time you
require in order to reach the suburbs is con-
sumed in this manner. A hundred years hence
trains will almost jump to full speed, somewhat
as a motor-car jumps to-day. In collecting
passengers at suburban stations, the train, a
hundred years hence, will perhaps not stop
at all. It will only slacken speed a little ; but
the platform will begin to move as the train
approaches, and will run along beside it, at the
same speed as the train itself, so that passengers
can get in and out as if the train were standing
still. When all are aboard, the doors will
be closed all together by the guard, and the
platform will reverse its motion, and return
to its original position ready for the next
train.

With trains travelling at quite 200 miles an
hour — and certainly nothing less will satisfy
the remoter suburbanites of next century —
frightful accidents would occur if precautions
were not taken. The moment two trains are
in the same section of line they will be
automatically cut off from the source of power,
and their brakes will at the same time bring
them to a standstill. A passenger who put
his head out of the window of a train travelling
at this speed would be blinded and suffocated ;
so the windows will be glazed, the oxygenators

30 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

and carbon-dioxide absorbers in each carriage
keeping the air sweet, and other suitable
appliances adjusting its temperature. There
will be no such thing as level crossings ;
wherever the road crosses the line there will
be bridges, provided with an endless moving
track (like the automatic staircase at the
Crystal Palace), to carry passengers and
vehicles across. Of course horses will long
since have vanished from the land, except as
instruments of the pleasure of a few cranks
who affect the manners of that effete period,
the year 1900.

And the omnipresence of high-speed
vehicles will in itself have eliminated much
danger of accident. It is not to be supposed
that the unresting march of mechanical im-
provement will have failed to have its effect on
the people. Man himself will have progressed.
He will be cleverer in avoiding accidents.
Cities will be provided with moving street-
ways, always in action at two or more speeds ;
and we shall have learned to hop on and off
the lowest speed from the stationary pavement,
and from the lower speeds to the higher,
without danger. When streets cross, one
rolling roadway will rise in a curve over the
other. There will be no vehicular traffic at
all in cities of any size ; all the transportation
will be done by the roads' own motion. In
smaller towns, and for getting from one town

FUTURE TRAVEL 31

to another, automatic motor-cars will exist,
coin-worked. A man who wishes to travel
will step into a motor-car, drop into a slot-
machine the coin which represents the hire of
the car for the distance he wants to travel, and
assume control. Here again the progress of
man will come into play. Everyone will know
how to drive a motor-car safely. If you doubt
it, consider for a moment the position of a man
of 1800 suddenly transported into a street of
modern London. He would never be able to
cross it ; the rush of omnibuses, motors and
bicycles would confuse and frighten him.
Imagine the same man trying to use the
underground railways of to-day, or to get up to
town from a busy suburb in the morning. He
would either be killed out of hand or left
behind altogether from sheer inability to enter
the train.

We may safely suppose that the ocean ships
of a hundred years hence will be driven by
energy of some kind transmitted from the
shores on either side. It is absolutely un-
questionable that no marine engine in the
least resembling what we know to-day can
meet the requirements of the new age. The
expense of driving a steamship increases in
such a ratio to its size and speed that the
economic limits of steam propulsion are fore-
seen. Probably the ships of A.D. 2000 will
differ entirely in appearance from those we

32 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

know. Just as road friction is the bugbear of
the railway engineer, so water-resistance is the
bugbear of the marine engineer. The ships of
a hundred years hence will not lie in the water.
They will tower above the surface, merely
skimming it with their keels, and the only
engines they will carry will be those which
receive and utilise the energy transmitted to
them from the power-houses ashore — perhaps
worked by the force of the very tides of the
conquered ocean itself.

The housing problem is so intimately and
visibly connected in our minds with the growth
of population that the more vital entanglement
of the latter with the food question is hardly
perceptible except to economic experts. The
ordinary newspaper reader is not in a position
to trace the intimate significance of prices ;
indeed, he often regards it as rather a good
thing that wheat should fetch a good price
per quarter, forgetting that low prices for
commodities mean increased purchasing power
for money, and a better standard of life for the
people. When such elementary implications
as this are overlooked, it is hardly remarkable
that the more obscure connection of population
with prices is never thought of. Yet it is
obvious that unless the sources of supply
increase more rapidly than the consuming
population, prices must rise — in other words,
the purchasing power of money must diminish.

POPULATION QUESTIONS 33

Wages, to some extent, will no doubt rise also,
but as competition seriously affects the markets
for manufactured goods and machinery, and
the increase of population not only tends to
raise prices of commodities, but also restricts
the rise of wages, relief will have to be found
in economies of various sorts. The standard
of comfort in working families must improve
considerably; partly because the demand for
improvement, taking the shape of industrial
combination and trade-unionism developed to
a high degree, will be more and more clamor-
ous ; partly because of public feeling. What
is currently called the growth of sentimentalism
in modern life is really the development of
modern conscience. No doubt the abolition
of judicial torture was at one time regarded as
a mark of absurd sentimentality ; and the
opinion has already been expressed that a
vast amelioration of public morality is in
store for the new age. A great element in
the conflict between comfort on the one
hand and competition on the other will be
economy of means. That is why the new
age will, among other things, be an age of
economy.

In the matter of food, chiefly, a great saving
can be effected. Nothing is more painfully
ludicrous — I use the incongruous collocution
advisedly — than the spectacle every winter of
money being- laboriously accumulated for the

34 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

provision of free meals for the poor, and spent,
to a great extent, so wastefully as on meat
soups and white bread. The crass ignorance
of the poor, who will not touch wholemeal
bread, and indeed regard the offer of it as
something in the nature of an insult ; and who
cannot be induced to believe that meat is one
of the least satisfactory and most expensive
forms of nourishment, is of course responsible
in great part for this error. If we would get our
nitrogen from pulses, nuts, and use vegetable
fats derived from nuts, and bread made from
entire wheat-kernels finely ground (instead of
being only half ground as in most " brown
breads")1 our "free dinner" chanties would
be able to feed at least twice or three times as
many people for every pound collected as they
do at present. But the proposal would
probably excite an outcry and we should hear
that the poor were being treated as animals
and that we fain would fill their bellies with
the husks that the swine do eat. But all kinds
of influences will tend to eliminate flesh from
the dietary of the new age. " Growing
sentimentalism," already in arms against the
use of animals for highly necessary scientific
investigations, will, as it develops, be revolted
by the idea of killing for food ; and the refine-
ment of the future will come to regard the

1 The chief difficulty in utilising the useful integument
of wheat disappears when the whole grain is finely milled.

POPULATION QUESTIONS 35

eating of dead bodies as very little better than
cannibalism. Moreover, the constantly in-
creasing demand of the new age upon bodily
and nervous energies will call for nourishment
suited to their supply. This, and the waste-
fulness of second-hand food, will banish all
flesh from the bill of fare. Fish will be eaten
longer than meat. But more than anything
else, the need for economy will reform our
dinner-tables, and eventually all food will have
to be obtained directly from the soil, if we are
to have food enough to nourish our overgrown
population at all. We shall not be able to
afford to waste the ground on pasturage. We
must use it to produce cereals, nuts and fruits,
which are not only a much more remunerative
crop, but will also use up in their assimilation
far less nervous and peptic energy — energy
which we shall need to make the most of.
The cereal foods — products of wheat, barley,
maize, and perhaps still (to a certain extent)
oats — which will form the staple of our diet,
will be partially cooked at the granaries by
dry heat ; they will need very little treatment
at home. Vegetables, cooked, not in the
wasteful manner now in vogue, but by con-
servative methods which will preserve their
valuable saline constituents, will have to be
prepared in our own kitchens ; but pulse in
various forms (as pease, lentil flour, etc.) will
be supplied to us almost wholly cooked. A

36 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

cheap, nourishing and delicious dietary will
thus be made available.

Finally, the reader will not be unprepared
for the opinion that alcohol, as a beverage,
must inevitably disappear. Not only because
the price of intoxicants is an unproductive
expenditure (and we shall have to be more
and more thrifty as time goes on) but because
the nerves of the new age would never stand
them, must all alcoholic beverages be regarded
as destined to obsolescence: and the legislative
aspect of this question must presently be
touched upon. Already a considerable part
of the people, in no way influenced by the
illogical idea that the abuse of a commodity
by one class calls for the abstention from it of
another, refrains from alcohol simply because
its use inflicts too great a strain on the system.
A good many people even now find it neces-
sary to abstain from tea or from coffee for
precisely similar reasons ; while the highly-
organised nervous systems of others find in
the latter a stimulant capable of all the
advantages of alcohol (and they are many)
and not without some of its penalties. I think
it quite likely that when alcohol is gone, the
nerves of the future may find it necessary to
place the sale of tea and of coffee under
restrictions similar to those at present inflicted
upon the trade in alcohol : and it is quite
certain that morphia, cocaine, chloral, perhaps

POPULATION QUESTIONS 37

ether, and similar products, will have to be
very jealously safeguarded within the next
few years.

Differing from many writers, I do not regard
this development of the nervous system as a
mark of degeneration. On the contrary, it is
a part of the great and rapid adaptation which
is bound to take place in the constitution of
man himself ' to the rapidly-changing con-
ditions of his environment, his life, and the
duties he will have to fulfil. To overlook the
certainty of such adaptations is to be blind to
all history, and especially to all recent history.
The men and women of the new age will
differ from ourselves in much the same sort of
way as we differ from our great-grandfathers.
They will differ more only because the progress
of the century which we have lately begun
will be so much more rapid and various than
those of the century before — itself the period
of enormously the greatest changes since the
world began to be civilised.

1 It is necessary to say here, as an offset to possible
misconstruction, that the word " evolution " has been
purposely abstained from. The processes of evolution are
far slower than the changes here contemplated. The
latter are voluntary and purposeful, involving no construc-
tional alteration in the physical frame of man, but only
functional modifications, intentionally inaugurated and
pursued.

CHAPTER III

THE MAN OF BUSINESS

WHATEVER changes may take place in the
organisation of society during the present
century, we may regard it as certain that the
folk who

" Rise up to buy and sell again "

will be always with us. The man of business
will possess many conveniences denied to the
city man of to-day. It is, for instance, to be
supposed that the inordinate defects of even
the best telephone systems will be eliminated.
When wireless communication of ideas has
been perfected, of course the telephone ex-
change Ayill disappear. Differential " tuning"
— the process by which any wireless telephone
will be able to be brought, as transmitter, into
correspondence with any other wireless tele-
phone, as receiver — will enable every merchant
to "call up" every other merchant. Instead
of, as at present, looking up his associate's
number in the directory, and getting connected
by the clumsy junction of wires at an exchange
office, the merchant will look up the tuning-

38

RECORDING TELEPHONES 39

formula, adjust his own telephone to it, and
ring a bell, or otherwise employ means for
attracting the attention of the man he wants
to speak to. As a great proportion of all the
business transacted will be done by telephones
the frequent occurrence of disputes as to what
has or has not been said in a given conversa-
tion will have rendered safeguards necessary.
Consequently, every telephone will be attached
to an instrument, developed from the phono-
graph, which will record whatever is said at
both ends of the line. Precautions will have
to be devised against eavesdropping. After
communication is established, probably both
parties to a conversation will retune their in-
struments to a fresh pitch, which, in cases
requiring special secrecy, could be privately
agreed upon beforehand.

The form which the records above suggested
will ultimately assume must be a matter of
conjecture. It is quite possible that the
written word may in all departments of life
lose some of its present vital importance. We
may imagine, if we choose, that instead of
creating records which can be read, we may
find it advisable to create records that can
be listened to : and some of the apparent in-
conveniences of this substitution may easily
be supposed to be dispensed with. The
handiness of a written memorandum is largely
a matter of habit. A practised eye can " skim "

40 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

a long document, and either through the use
of black-type headlines, or by pure skill, alight
upon exactly the passage required ; and if it
were necessary, in order to find a given passage,
to listen to the whole document being read
over by the recording phonograph, no doubt
much time would be lost. We shall not be so
extremely intolerant of loss of time, perhaps, in
the new age, as some people imagine : but in
any case, if the speed of the phonograph be ima-
gined as adjustable, it will be perceived that we
could then make it gabble parrotwise over the
inessential, and let it linger with more delibera-
tion over what we wanted to assure ourselves
of. We could even "skip" useless portions
— one can do this with phonographs already
in use. Probably such aural records may be
made capable of acceptance in courts of law,
and the maxim verbum auditum manet will take
the place of a well-known proverb of our day.
Very likely business letters may some day take
the form of conveniently-shaped tablets, made
of some plastic material, and capable of being
utilised by means of a talking machine.

Or if these changes seem too chimerical, we
may essay the more difficult task of conceiving
a means by which the spoken word may be
directly translatable into print or typewriting.
The waste of time and energy entailed by the
present plan of dictating what we want to say
to a stenographer or into a phonograph, for

RECORDING TELEPHONES 41

subsequent transcription, renders some sort of
improvement urgently needful ; nor are these
wastes the only grievance, as the introduction
of a second personality into the operation of
recording speech introduces a simultaneous
possibility of error, and an outrageous waste
of time is caused by the necessity of reading
over what one has dictated laboriously to a
stenographer or into a phonograph, to make
sure that it is correctly transcribed. It is
obviously a much more difficult matter to
translate speech directly into printed words
than to translate it into something which may
again produce the sounds of speech. The
first step would be the invention of something
which would print a phonetic representation of
speech — as, for instance, shorthand of the kind
invented by Sir Isaac Pitman. Even this
requires us to imagine machinery of a kind
whose very rudiments do not at present exist.
Indeed, we can only conceive such an instru-
ment by the use of the supposition that some
entirely new manipulation of sound-waves will
be discovered ; and if we conceive that, there
is no particular reason why we should hesitate
before the notion of speech directly translated
into print such as we use in everyday life. If
we are going to limit the possibilities of the
future by the actual achievements of the
present, we shall certainly fall short of any
adequate notion of what a hundred years'

42 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

accelerated progress may be capable of: and
I do not see wherein the direct reproduction
suggested is any more inconceivable than, for
example, telephony, or even photography, must
have been to a man of a hundred years ago.
The greatest danger attending our attempt to
preconceive the amenities of the next century
is that we may limit our expectations too
narrowly.

On this ground, perhaps, I may be thought
too cautious in assuming that the present form
of alphabetical writing and printing will survive
at all. But there are two things which seem
likely to give it permanence. The first, of
course, is literature. If we adopt an entirely
new form of writing and printing for general
use, we must either set to work to translate all
our literature into it, thereby probably losing
some formal beauties which the culture of the
world will not consent to sacrifice ; or we
must make up our minds to use (as the
Japanese do at present) two kinds of writing
concurrently ; and the difficulty of overcoming
the vast inertia of the human mind (which
alone still suffices to exclude from English
commerce so obviously convenient an innova-
tion as decimal coinage) will probably negative
this. This inertia is the second consideration
likely to give permanence to our present form
of English alphabetical writing.

However this may be, the convenience of

THE ALPHABET, A.D. 2000 43

direct wireless telephony will certainly, when
supplemented by records of whatever kind,
greatly facilitate commerce. The tedious
process of writing a letter, posting it, and
awaiting the reply, at present persisted in
chiefly because it is so necessary to have some
sort of documentary evidence of what has
passed, will be largely dispensed with when
we can secure an automatic record of what
we say. Nearly everything will be done by
word of mouth.

The great inconvenience, apart from the
absence of record, which attaches to transac-
tions or negotiations by telephone at the
present day, is that a telephonic conversation
is not nearly so satisfactory as a personal
interview face to face. Gesture, attitude,
the language of face and eyes, all do so much
to elucidate communication in the latter way,
that we lose a great deal when we meet an
associate at the other end of a telephone wire.
Well, the telephone of the new age will
remove this drawback, or rather it will be
supplemented by something which will do so.
This invention, not at all difficult to imagine,
I will call provisionally the teleautoscope. It
will no doubt have some name equally
barbarous. The teleautoscope can be ex-
plained in a single sentence. It will be an
instrument for seeing by electricity. What-
ever is before the transmitting teleautoscope

UNIVERSi

44 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

will be visible before the receiving teleauto-
scope wirelessly en rapport with the former.
Thus by telephone, by phonograph, and by
teleautoscope, a wireless conversation will
combine all the advantages of a personal
interview and a written correspondence.

No doubt the post - office system of this
country, despite occasional lapses, is as nearly
perfect as any human institution, in the present
state of society, can be reasonably expected to
be. But it is equally certain that in so far as
postal communication is required at all in the
new age it will have to be vastly improved both
as to speed and precision, compared with what
we now, sometimes rather thanklessly, enjoy.
For instance, that impatient age will certainly
not tolerate the inconvenience of having to send
out to post its letters and parcels, or the tardi-
ness of having these articles sorted and passed
on for delivery only at intervals of half an hour
or so. We may take it for granted that every
well-equipped business office will be in direct
communication, by means of large-calibred
pneumatic tubes, with the nearest post-office.
And however rapidly and however frequently
the trains or airships of the period may travel,
the process of making up van loads of mail
matter for despatch to remote centres, and re-
distribution there, is far too clumsy for what
commerce will demand a hundred years
hence. No doubt the soil of every civilised

FREIGHT AND TRANSPORT 45

country will be permeated by vast networks of
pneumatic tubes : and all letters and parcels
will be thus distributed at a speed hardly
credible to-day.

Already every bank of any importance prob-
ably uses calculating machines. It is not
likely that the fatiguing and uncertain process
of having arithmetical calculations of any sort
performed in the brains of clerks will survive
the improvements of which these machines are
capable. Account books, invoices, and all
similar documents will doubtless be written by
a convenient and compendious form of com-
bined calculating machine and typewriter,
which we may suppose to be called the
numeroscriptor. It will, of course, be capable
of writing anywhere — on a book or on a loose
sheet, on a flat surface or on an irregular one.
It will make any kind of calculation required.
Even such operations as the weighing and
measurement of goods will all be done by
automatic machinery,1 capable of recording
without any possibility of error the quantity
and values of goods submitted to its opera-
tion.

Naturally transport will be the subject of
something like a renascence. So far as inland

1 There is a contrivance already in existence which not
only weighs what is placed upon it, but can also be made
to calculate the value of the goods at any desired rate per
ounce, pound or hundredweight.

46 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

communication goes, the chief difficulties to be
overcome already call loudly for amendment.
We cannot for more than a decade or so make
do with the present railway tracks, and either
(as already hinted) by means of some invention
to enable trains to run one above another, or
by some entirely new carrying device such as I
will now try to suggest, the new age will
certainly supersede or supplement the transport
of to-day.

The device most likely to be adopted, in the
near future at all events, is something in the
nature of elevated trottoirs roulants for goods.
If we can conceive all the cities of a country to
be linked-up by a system of great overways,
we have at all events a feasible solution of the
difficulty. There could be a double row of tall,
massive pillars, between which could run a
wide track, always in motion at considerable
speed. It need not be a lightning speed.
Most of the tardiness of railway transportation
does not, in this country at all events, arise
from slowness of trains, but from congestion at
goods stations, and this in turn is due, partly
to insufficiency of rolling stock, but much more
to insufficiency of permanent way. The latter
evil is very difficult to cope with. But the
system of moving ways, providing a rolling
stock equal in length to the line itself, will be
a great saving. Returning upon itself the
endless track will continuously transport mer-

NO MORE GOODS TRAINS 47

chandise in both directions. Elevators, suitably
placed, will give access to it wherever needed.
Probably the motive power will be electrical :
and we may confidently anticipate entirely
new sources of electricity. It is obviously
clumsy to create power in the first instance,
convert power into electricity (I use popular
language), and then convert electricity back
again into power. Much more hopeful than
any idea of developing that method would be
the conception of new ways of creating and
applying motive-power directly. But, almost
certainly, electricity, obtained in some new way,
will do the work of the world for many genera-
tions yet — until, in fact, we devise or discover
something more convenient.

It will have been perceived that nearly every
improvement and innovation above sketched
out involves, and will be indeed designed to
effect, great saving of labour. With such
economies, and an increased population, there
is evidently going to be a difficulty about
employment.

Moreover, the great facilities enjoyed by
commerce will tend to make commerce ex-
tremely powerful. Already great organisers
of business begin to evade competition by
combining in vast "trusts," whose tendency is
to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
There is a further cause for the aggrandise-
ment of the large trader and manufacturer at

48 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

the expense of the petty retail dealer. More
and more every year the unprogressive methods
of small shopkeepers foster the success of
large multiple retailers. But it is likely that
retail businesses, whether great or small, will
ultimately tend to be eliminated. Manu-
facturers and trust companies will supply the
public directly. What, then, will be the solu-
tion of the great social difficulties about to be
created ?

The answer is, that these difficulties, and
especially the developments above confidently
predicted for a future comparatively near,
are probably transient in their nature. It is
not yet the time to discuss political questions r
but the problem here directly raised demands a
few words of reassurance from the professed
optimist.

There can be no doubt of the great social
and political dangers involved in so enormous
an aggrandisement of the commercial and
manufacturing class as we shall most of us live
to witness. What is called the problem of the
unemployed grows every year more difficult and
less obviously hopeful. Moreover, the concen-
tration of great wealth in a few hands is in itself
a political danger, even apart from the fact that
it implies widespread impoverishment. There
are dangers of corrupt legislation, for instance,
and other dangers too.

But there will be another great force at work

LIMITATION OF WEALTH 49

in which may be foreseen the solution of many
difficulties beside this. When public education
becomes rationalised ; when it is employed
chiefly as a means of character-making ; when
the universal education of mankind has the
effect of turning out men and women capable
of thinking, and not merely of remembering,
the teeming population of the working class
will begin to exercise an intelligent influence on
the legislature — which at present it certainly
cannot be said to do. And one thing which the
intelligently-elected Parliaments of the new
age will assuredly discover is this principle :
that it is not good for the State that any one
man, or any one associated body of men, should
possess an inordinate amount of wealth.1

Once this principle is discovered and acted
upon ; once it is illegal for any person or cor-
poration to be seised of more than a certain
fixed capital ; the dangers of inconvenient

1 A practical objection to this principle may be here anti-
cipated and answered. Politicians may say that for any one
nation to be the pioneer in the adoption of such a policy
would have the effect of driving trade and manufactures into
other countries where the restriction did not exist. But
there are so many highly necessary reforms open to a similar
objection that I think there is no doubt that ultimately the
jurists of all nations will agree upon some arrangement for
universal legislation, whereby laws not affecting the relations
of one country with another will be simultaneously enacted
by a comity of nations. We have already one very imper-
fect example of such a procedure in the Convention against
bounty-helped sugar.

50 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

aggrandisement will vanish. Nor is this
principle in any way unprogressive or injurious
to the commonwealth. It is, in fact, not even
injurious to the individuals affected. No
reasonably-enlightened being can pretend that
a sensible hardship would be inflicted on
millionaires by being forbidden to pile Pelion
upon Ossa in their present insane manner. A
very rich man, compelled to desist from the
accumulation of wealth, and consequently driven
to the task of finding out how to enjoy it intelli-
gently, would be almost infinitely better off for
this constraint. The effect of the ordinance
for the limitation of wealth will be to remove
all temptation to concentrate manufactures in a
few hands. It will open the doors shut by
trust companies on competition. It will
multiply factories of moderate and convenient
size : and one other effect of it will be to
improve many manufacturing processes in
themselves. There are a great many things
which can be cheaply turned out in uniform
batches, every article exactly the counterpart
of every other, hideous in economical uni-
formity, because they all emanate from one or
two great factories, which, if the manufacture
of them were distributed over a number of small
factories, would, from this circumstance alone,
and from the stress of wholesome competition,
be greatly improved. Probably many industries,
desirable in themselves, but driven out of

REVIVED HANDICRAFTS 51

successful being by our present system of con-
centrated manufacturing, would revive. Crafts
of what we call regretfully the good old kinds
would spring up, rejuvenated : cheap uniformity
would cease to be the principal ideal of manu-
facture. The people would be able to afford
agreeable furniture, utensils, decorations, and
household goods of all kinds, where they now
have to put up with horrible but cheap make-
shifts. For one great advantage of the
ordinance just predicted must not be lost sight
of. When you restrain the rich from becoming
inordinately richer, you concurrently save the
poor from being made proportionately poorer.
This ideal, it should be remarked, is in no sense
socialistic. It is, on the contrary, the natural
development of individualism.

Hardly less certain is it that before the
beginning of the twenty-first century all manu-
factures and all commerce will be co-operative,
the workers in every industry being paid, not
by fixed wages, but by a share in the produce
of their labour. Instead of the profit of all
trade and manufacture being secured to the
managers and owners of lands, machinery,
transport and other commercial utilities ; while
labour, the equally necessary and indeed the
preponderant element of production, is reckoned
as a mere element of cost, in the form of wages ;
the profit will be shared all round. The more
prosperous the enterprise, the more money the

52 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

workers will receive. No man will be able to
grow rich by sweating his workmen. Neither
will the present degrading temptation for every
workman to perform his task as perfunctorily
and as lazily as he can, so long as he does not
get dismissed from work altogether, survive
this reform. On the contrary, it will be directly
worth every man's while to do his work as well
as he possibly can. The dignity of labour — a
phrase now justly mocked — will become an
elevating and delightful practicality. A great
many articles of everyday use will be better
made than it is possible to get them made
to-day. The spectacle of the producers of
wealth herding in squalid cabins, clothed in the
rags of cast-off clothing, eating garbage, en-
joying nothing but intoxication, will give way
to a more wholesome and natural state of
affairs. Nor will the owners of machinery, of
factories and the like long oppose this de-
velopment. What are called labour-troubles
will cease to exist when the interest of employer
and employed is identical. The problem of the
unemployed will solve itself. Leisure, and an
opportunity to employ leisure wisely, will have
been bestowed upon the poor as well as we
have seen that it will be bestowed upon the
rich. A man will have no need to spend
practically all the unfatigued hours of every day
at the bench, the loom, or the lathe. He will
want recreation. While one batch of men is

THE WORKING MAN 53

seeking this there will be an opportunity for
other batches to work. And work itself, once
it is work for an intelligent objective, once it is
work that there is a comprehensible reason for
trying to execute as well as it can possibly be
executed, will lose much of its irksomeness — to
the vast improvement alike of the product and
the producer.

CHAPTER IV

THE CULT OF PLEASURE

CERTAIN predictions in the foregoing chapter
will have suggested to all who accept them
that the cultivation of pleasure must occupy a
large part of the energy of the new age.
From the moment when men, sufficiently astute
and purposeful to accumulate enormous fortunes
if they were permitted to do so, are required by
law to desist from useless and injurious money-
getting, a vast amount of ingenuity will be
diverted to the development of the useless.
The skill expended upon money-making — and
let it be admitted frankly that, however un-
scrupulous one may be, it is not easy to become
a millionaire — will be turned to the task, almost
equally difficult, of spending it satisfactorily.
We may consider it as practically certain that
the pleasures of the new age will be largely
intellectual in their nature. The stupidity of
merely sensual pleasures will revolt the intelli-
gence of the future. Athletic sports of some
kind, facilitated by certain inventions which
can easily be foreseen, will no doubt be a

54

THE CULT OF PLEASURE 55

source of much enjoyment, though the grow-
ing gentleness of mankind will abolish, as
barbarous, games which take the form of modi-
fied assault, as football, boxing, wrestling,
fencing and the like. We shall certainly
acquire a great distaste for fighting in any
form when growing humanitarianism shall have
put an end to war — a development which may
confidently be predicted for the present century.
Similarly — " Am I God, to kill and to make
alive?" — we shall cease to take life for our
amusement ; as, for sentimental and other
reasons, it has been shown that we shall cease
to kill for food.

What then will be our games ? One of the
most likely instruments of sport will no doubt
be the small flying-machine. It is not in the
least probable, so far as can at present be
foreseen, that purely aerial and self-directed
vehicles for purposes of travel or transportation
will be a feature of the new civilisation. The
dangers and inconvenience of large aerostats
are less accidents of imperfect invention than
inherent difficulties of the subject. It is very
probable that some means of propelling self-
supported vehicles between guideways may be
discovered. But, as it is not at all likely that
any means of suspending the effect of air-resist-
ance can ever be devised, a flying-machine must
always be slow and cumbersome. Travel and
transportation, to be attractive in the new

56 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

age, must be rapid in the extreme. Ships no
doubt will skim the surface of the sea instead
of resting upon it. But air-ships are not
very likely to be anything but a sort of vast
toy, within, at all events, the next hundred
years.

But, as a means of amusement, the idea of
aerial travel has great promise. Small one-
man flying-machines, or the aerial counterpart
of tandem bicycles, will no doubt be common
enough. We shall fly for pleasure ; and just
as thousands of working men and women now
take a Saturday-afternoon spin on a bicycle, so
they will go for a sky-trip, and visit interesting
mountain-tops for (non-alcoholic) picnics. The
bicycle or the motor-cycle will perhaps be the
point of development. It is quite certain that
within the next ten or fifteen years some means
will have been discovered by which we can ride
on a single wheel. The saving of weight thus
effected will go a long way towards surmount-
ing the flight problem. Then, when motor-
unicycles are presently propelled by force
transmitted (in the same way as Marconi's
telegrams) from a fixed power-house, the
difficulty of flight will be within sight of an easy
solution. Any competent mechanician of the
present day could design a flying-machine if
the mere weight of the motive appliance could
be overcome. When the motor is fixed on
terra firma, and the vehicle only needs to carry

OUR GAMES IN A.D. 2000 57

a device for utilising the aetheric waves which
the source of power wirelessly transmits, flight
will be at least as simple a matter as wireless
telegraphy is to-day.

When it is possible to cross the Atlantic in a
day by means of surface-riding ships, propelled,
like the flying-machines, by aetheric force, the
field of amusement will be vastly increased, and
although (as I shall show) it will no longer be
necessary to travel in order to " see the sights "
of any part of the world, the pleasure of being
present at the actual events of life in different
countries will probably never pall. So long
as any parts of the world remain comparatively
unfamiliar, young men and maidens will love
travel. When it is possible, wrapped in warm
woollens and provided with portable heating-
appliances, to pay a short visit to the Arctic
circle and enjoy the matchless spectacle of the
Aurora Borealis amid the awe-compelling ob-
scurities of the Polar night : when, with even
less inconvenience, we can take a trip to the
tropics and witness, here the unchangeable
processes of Nature's luxuriance, there the
perhaps immutable conservatism of the East,
the new leisure of the coming time will have
great stores of recreation for those happy
enough to live in the dawning twenty-first
century.

The more distinctively intellectual pleasures
of the new age will be much subserved by one

58 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

class of invention, of which the rudiments
already exist. By means of the phonograph
we are able, not very perfectly, to reproduce as
often as we desire sounds created in favourable
circumstances. By various kinds of kineto-
scope we can reproduce a rudimentary sort of
picture of an event which has taken place in a
good light. But when the phonograph has
been developed, when moving pictures have
been perfected, what a vast implement of
amusement may be foreseen ! Each of these
inventions is comparatively new. If we im-
agine the discovery of means, developed from
the phonograph, by which any sounds which
have once existed in the presence of a record-
ing machine can be reproduced at will, not in a
makeshift sort of way, but without any loss of
timbre and quality, with perfect articulation
where articulation is necessary, with exactly
correct time-regulation automatically determined
by the first enunciation, and all this cheaply and
compendiously, what vast resources of cultured
enjoyment are offered to the lover of music !
How many people, denied the pleasure of learn-
ing to understand good music by the difficulties
and exertion attendant upon our infrequent
and expensive concerts, will become true lovers
and appreciators of it ! For music is only
to be really enjoyed by the average man
when it is repeatedly heard, repeatedly
considered. Certainly the people of the

THE THEATRE, A.D. 2000 59

new age will be epicures of the emotions
which comprehended music is so nobly capable
of stirring.

No doubt the new age will have solved, in
a far more satisfactory way than we have been
able to solve as yet, the problem of chro-
matic photography. When colour influences
photographic plates or some contrivance substi-
tuted for them, not indirectly by a mechanical
sorting-out of tints, but by affecting directly
the optical properties of the plates or whatever
may succeed plates, we shall have marvellously
accurate pictures.1

Nor is this all. The kinetoscope, as at
present exhibited under various unpleasing
names, is imperfect in two ways : first because
it is powerless to reproduce colour, and secondly
because it gives at best a mere magic-lantern
picture violently out of focus, and by its pulsa-
tory motion horribly distressing to the eyes.
Chromatic photography will overcome the
former difficulty. When we find out how to
increase greatly the receptive rapidity of photo-
graphic emulsion without spoiling what photo-
graphers call the " grain " of it ; or when we
have improved, as we every year are improving,

1 Not of course in the artistic sense of the word; nor is
the supersession of art by optical process in the least con-
templated here. The psychological interest of art will have
appreciators more and more numerous in virtue of the diffu-
sion of culture confidently anticipated.

60 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

the optical qualities of lenses, we shall be able
to have our pictures in focus. The distressing
flicker of moving pictures is an objection purely
mechanical in its cause. But when, as they
will be in a few years, all these objections
except the first have been removed, and even
when we have colour-photography in a true
sense of the word, there will still remain one
field to conquer. We must have, instead of
moving pictures, something which represents
all objects as solid. The difference is the
difference between an ordinary photograph and
a highly-improved stereoscopic picture magni-
fied to life-size. When these advantages are
attained it will be possible to represent, exactly
as it happened, any event which has been suit-
ably photographed.

The utility of this as a means of intelligent
amusement will be at once perceived. Imagine
the theatre of the future. Probably it will not
be beyond the means of the rich, even when
restrained from over-possession as it is evident
that they must be, to have theatre-rooms in
their own houses. But the masses will no
doubt go to the theatre much as they do now.
Only instead of seeing a company of actors and
actresses, more or less mediocre, engaged in
the degrading task of repeating time after time
the same words, the same gestures, the same
actions, they will see the performance of a com-
plete "star" company, as once enacted at its

THE EMANCIPATED ACTOR 61

very best, reproduced as often as it may be
wanted, the perfected kinetoscope exhibiting
the spectacle of the stage, the talking machine
and the phonograph (doubtless differentiated)
rendering perfectly the voices of the actors and
the music of the orchestra. There will be no
need for the employment of inferior actors in
the small parts. As the production of any play
will only demand that it be worked up to the
point of perfection and then performed once,
there will be no difficulty in securing the most
perfect rendering that it is capable of. The
actor's art will be immensely elevated, not only
by his relief from the drudgery of repeated
performance and by the leisure thus afforded
him for study and reflection, but also by the
removal of what is keenly felt by all players of
sensibility and ambition as one of the greatest
drawbacks of the stage. We are accustomed
to the actor's complaint that whereas the author,
the sculptor, the painter, the composer of music,
makes for himself a fame imperishable as the
products of his art, the actor frets his hour and
disappears from the stage, to be promptly for-
gotten by an ungrateful public. Well, the
actor's art, like the art of the executant
musician, will have the endowment of perma-
nency. And there will be a magnificent
opportunity for the actor as artist, in that he
will be able to compare himself and his fellows
with the actors who are dead and can act no

62 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

more. It is probably true that Irving is the
greatest actor since Garrick, but who can prove
it ? The actor's art is transient to-day : it will
be permanent, it will be classical, in the next
century. By this fact not only will the pleasures
of the theatre be made cheap, convenient and
varied, but the art of the theatre will be vastly
improved.

Just as the actor will be spared the drudgery
of mechanical, parrotlike repetition, so the in-
different maidens of the new age will have
no need to waste their time in learning to play
upon musical instruments more or less im-
perfectly. No doubt some who are not pro-
fessional musicians will do so for their own
pleasure. But the professional executant him-
self will cease, like the actor, to rank as a sort
of superior harlequin or performing animal,
exhibiting his powers for the diversion of an
assembled public. What he has once played
can, if he choose, be constantly repeated. The
executant will be paid by a royalty on each
reproduction, when he is wise. Less prudent
artists will sell their records for a lump sum,
just as the unthrifty author sells his copyrights.
But let it be noted that, on the assumption
that the reproduction is perfect, the evolution
above predicted is a highly artistic one. In-
stead of the executant or singer being judged
by his performance on an occasion when
fatigue, illness or unfavourable circumstances

NEW DELIGHTS OF A.D. 2000 63

may militate against his perfect success, when
the nerve-shattering conditions of the platform
probably in any case offend his susceptibilities
and detract from the perfection of his perform-
ance, he will be able to found his reputation
upon the very best performance he is capable
of. He will be able to try and try again in
the privacy of his study. When he has satisfied
himself, and then alone, will he publish his
artistic effort to the world. He can destroy as
many unsatisfactory records as he pleases, just
as the sculptor can break up his clay when he
has not succeeded, just as the painter can paint
out his picture when it has not pleased him,
and be judged only by his best.

It would be ignoring the most obvious char-
acteristics of mankind to suppose that the
pleasures of the new age will be limited to a
mere mechanical development of those which
we enjoy at present. There can be no doubt
that new delights will be invented. With a
general improvement in intelligence and in the
standard of comfort ; with a moneyed class
compelled, by the enactments which we have
imagined, to enjoy a considerable accession of
leisure ; with conditions which will, as we have
hoped, reduce materially the necessary hours
of labour for the worker ; with some of the
most engrossing amusements of the present
age abolished for sentimental reasons ; we may
take it for granted that a great demand for

64 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

new recreations will develop. Some of these
considerations might easily give us pause. We
might perhaps fear that vice — either the exten-
sion of existing vices or (if that indeed be
possible) the invention of new ones — might be
a terrifying problem of the next century, if we
had not foreseen, concurrently with the other
developments anticipated, a marked moral
improvement in human nature. There is in
the calculations of the pessimist and the re-
actionary no fallacy more mischievous than the
oft-recited aphorism that human nature is the
same in all places and at all times. That is
precisely what human nature is not. Spectacles
which delighted ancient Rome would revolt
modern civilisation. Spectacles which are still
keenly enjoyed in Spain would revolt England
or the United States, and probably awaken the
activity of the police. Human morality has
demonstrably advanced in historic time : it has
very perceptibly advanced, as I showed in an
earlier chapter,1 during the nineteenth century.
But the improvement in this respect which the
next hundred years will show must, in all
human probability, greatly excel that of the
past time. And thus, though a sane and
reasonable anticipation will not exclude the
possibility of regrettable accidents in the future
moral history of mankind, it will also regard
them as probably transient. The vices re-
1 Ante, Chapter I.

THE PSYCHICAL SIDE 65

garded as incident to complicated civilisations
have perhaps been too hastily considered by
despairing moralists. Vice is essentially stupid.
It is only in occasional, in sporadic instances
that we are presented with the terrible spectacle
of great intelligences depraved by gross im-
morality and animalism : and even then, this
combination is only possible where a high
degree of culture is in contact with a wide-
spread unintelligence. Most likely it will be
found, when the abstract laws of vice come to
be mapped out with more exactness than, so
far as I am aware, they have yet been, that
the degeneracies and immoralities of greatly-
civilised ages are in reality only the product of
luxury seated upon degradation. The French
moralists of the eighteenth century had a
glimmering of this in their idyllic pictures of
reformed society, when the old morality of the
simple life was to return with the abolition of
oligarchic splendour and popular misery.

In one direction we may see means by
which intelligent recreation may be supposed
capable of vast developments. Already the
study of the psychical side of man has been the
means of extraordinary discoveries. Our
knowledge of hypnotism, suggestion, thought-
transference and similar psychological wonders,
obscured though it has unhappily been by
charlatanism and the importation into the
subject of irrelevant follies, has great promise

66 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

for the future man, whose psychical faculties
will unquestionably develop at the expense of
his animal instincts. It is hardly possible to
limit our conception of the means by which
thought will be communicated in the next
century, but we may see just where the change
will probably come. A printed essay, such as
this, is obviously a successive translation of
thought into words (in the brain), then of the
words into letters, and then of letters into type,
which is picked up by the eye, retranslated
into words by one part of the brain, and finally
transmuted into thought again in another part.
If some method can be discovered of abolishing
one or more of these processes, thought can be
conveyed from brain to brain at an enormously
increased pace, and with a delicacy of which we
have no present conception. This develop-
ment is not so inconceivable as it at first
appears. We know as yet almost nothing of
the processes by which (for instance) vibration,
accepted by the ear as sound, is, in the brain-
cells behind the ear, converted into thought.
Speech and writing are purely conventional
devices. If, instead of using these conven-
tions, we can learn to transmit ideas immedi-
ately from brain to brain, the next step may be
an extraordinary development of intellectual
pleasures, in the case of those individuals
whose tastes are capable of thus being
ministered to. But to say this is not to imply

THE PSYCHICAL SIDE 67

that the ordinary means of human intercom-
munication will be dispensed with. For most
occasions, and for all but the subtlest and most
refined necessities of thought, no doubt books,
newspapers and letters will remain a feature
of everyday life — though of course with such
modifications as the progress of the century
will have called forth. The future of the
newspaper in particular is a subject of such
great importance that it requires to be dis-
cussed in detail.

CHAPTER V

THE NEWSPAPER OF THE FUTURE, AND THE
FUTURE OF THE NEWSPAPER

SUSPENDING, as hardly within the bounds of
manageable conjecture, any attempt to follow
up the suggestion with which the previous
chapter concluded, we can very easily imagine
the lines on which newspapers such as we know
are likely to develop mechanically. A number
of processes already existing in embryo can be
shown to be capable of very great extension ;
and several discoveries which an intelligent anti-
cipation is capable of predicting could, and
doubtless will, be applied to journalism.

To foresee the future of the newspaper on
what may be called the editorial side is a much
more difficult task, because we have here to
take into account the influence of the developed
and rationalised education of the people, which
is certain to demand very great changes. Daily
newspapers of the present moment are in a
more or less transitional state. It can hardly,
I think, be denied that the papers which enjoy
the greatest popularity exhibit retrogression in

63

NEWSPAPERS, A.D. 2000 69

many respects when compared with the best
newspapers of twenty-five years ago. But they
are much more widely and popularly read. The
collective influence of their largely-extended
circulations is no doubt very great, though the
influence of the newspaper on the individual is
less, and is attained in a different way. The
old .; newspapers aimed, and the survivors of
their class still aim, at an influence based on
argument. They used to report events,
speeches and movements of their age more or
less colourlessly, and to comment upon these
things more or less one-sidedly, according to
their respective political bias. They were pon-
derous, cultured, dignified, and a trifle dull.
When an adverse statesman made a speech
which they did not like, they reported it faith-
fully, and tore it to pieces in the formidable
middle pages. The leading article was their
most important weapon : they sought their
chief effect by its means. But the day of the
leading article is nearly ended. The newspaper
of the early — perhaps the immediate — future
will almost certainly dispense with leading
articles altogether, and be much more a news-
carrier than an educator. It will attack adverse
opinion by simply not reporting it. 1 1 will some-
times, no doubt, minimise facts unfavourable to
its political side by garbling them. But leading
articles had a useful function not yet men-
tioned— that of explaining the news-columns.

70 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

Things which the ordinary (but fairly intelli-
gent) newspaper-reader was likely to have
forgotten, or to be ignorant of, were (and still
are, where leading articles worthy of the name
exist) explained and amplified. In the news-
paper of the future, little paragraphs having the
same purpose will no doubt be, as they already
begin to be, tacked on to the ends of news-
items : and so far as comment continues to be
given at all, on such matters as political speeches
from the enemy, it will be given in this form.
Speeches from the newspaper's own side will
not require comment. Newspaper space will
have too many demands upon it to permit of
a statesman's arguments being first printed
semi - verbatim (actual verbatim reporting
hardly exists even now) and then marshalled
forth all over again in editorials. Whatever
attempt is made to influence opinion through
political reporting will be made by selective
processes. The arguments of the adversary
will be simply suppressed.

Although the old newspaper was really a
much more intelligent affair than the popular
dailies of the present decade — and it is chiefly
of daily papers that I am now speaking — it is
not very likely that a reversion will take place.
It is a curious feature of all progress, that how-
ever much an existing institution may be per-
ceived to be retrograde in comparison with
older institutions, reversion hardly ever occurs.

NEWSPAPERS, A.D. 2000 71

We adapt and modify what we have. We do
not revive what we have lost. And the re-
generation of the newspaper will be forced upon
the newspaper- office by the development of
public intelligence. Comment will probably
during the next few decades be eliminated from
daily journalism altogether, and confined to
serious weekly publications, somewhat on the
lines of our monthly reviews, and to other
publications summarising the latter, like the
present Review of Reviews^ perhaps the most
useful periodical now being issued, with the
single exception of The Times. Thus the daily
newspaper will be entirely a vehicle for the pro-
pagation of news, correctly so called : and very
likely it will become almost entirely colourless,
politically, because a well-informed public will
resent obvious garbling or clearly unfair selec-
tion. The newspaper reader will no longer
(as now) want only to hear what is said on a
side more or less emotionally and hardly at
all reflectively embraced. He will want to
know what is said on all sides, and will make
up his own mind, instead of swallowing whole
the printed opinions, real or momentarily as-
sumed, of other people. Thus, though the
frantic popular paper of to-day will no doubt
increase and multiply, and replenish its circula-
tion books, as long as the present system of
blind half-education survives, the newspaper
which satisfies the new age will be a very dif-

72 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

ferent affair. It will no doubt discard many of
the trivialities now reported as news, when a
black woman of Timbuctoo could hardly bring
forth four piccaninnies at a birth without the
fact getting into the halfpenny London papers ;
but it will record the really important news
in ways far more graphic, and with a far
more complete appeal to the imagination, than
we have as yet any but the vaguest notion of.

The news considered most important a
hundred years hence will probably be news
as to developments of public opinion. It is
hardly conceivable that exactly the methods of
Government which exist at present will satisfy
the developed consciousness of the new time :
and most likely the methods then adopted for
the ascertainment of public opinion, and the
machinery devised for giving it administrative
effect, will create subject-matter for a type of
journalism of which the very perceptible
rudiments, though still nothing but the
rudiments, already exist. If I am right in
expecting great results to flow from new ideas
and practice in our educational system, it is
certain that the notion of political freedom will
greatly extend its effect : and the unavoidable
corollary is that movements of public thought
will become a matter of the very keenest
journalistic interest and of the very highest
journalistic importance. The most probable
means to be adopted for giving effect, in the

NEWSPAPERS, A.D. 2000 73

middle-distance of the future, to developed
public feeling must be left for discussion in a
later chapter : but when we perceive that the
political duty of executing the will of the
people must constitute the paramount work of
the constitution-builder in the latter half of
the present century, we cannot fail to deduce a
vast effect on newspapers.

Broadly speaking, what will occur will be
the result of clearer thinking. We shall very
likely amend our political institutions after the
characteristic English manner, which is
perhaps really the safest, though it rather
suggest the methods of a cobbler who repairs
a boot by, from time to time, successively replac-
ing sole, vamp, golosh and upper, until there
remains a boot which is not a new boot, though
it contains none of the original boot's material.
Our constitutionhasbeenbuilt(to employ a better
similitude) by a series of architects who recon-
struct and repair the old building, with a
constant adhesion to as much of the old style
as they can retain, and who will in the end
present the people with a house entirely re-
constructed, but bearing marks all over it of
the original design. We already begin to
perceive that what is regarded as political
freedom at the present day has developed from
the entire tyranny of absolute monarchy, through
the modified tyranny of limited monarchies,
still not wholly powerless, to the nearly

74 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

absolute tyranny of parliaments. The last now
begin to delegate powers to local councils
having administrative functions, and must pres-
ently delegate them to local parliaments having
legislative functions on some <( home- rule-all-
round " principle, not because decentralisation
is liked, but because the intolerable incon-
veniences of centralisation will make decen-
tralisation inevitable. The more energetic
propagandists of various systems of con-
stitutional reform nearly all agree in one
respect : they all desire to set up some new
kind of tyranny. Few — except the philo-
sophical anarchists, who suffer from the oppro-
brium brought upon the name of anarchists by
quite a different set of thinkers — perceive that
to endow with power any sort of machinery
resting on the shifting will of a majority tends
very little towards freedom and not at all
towards stability — the latter even more im-
portant in some respects than the former. In
proportion to the development of education
(in nature even more than in extent), it is
likely that the present blind faith of the public
in the ability of the State to do almost any-
thing, and the still blinder tendency of the
public to require the State to do all sorts of
things which could be better accomplished
otherwise, will diminish, and we shall perceive
the enormous educational disadvantage of
allowing the citizen to lean too heavily on the

NEWSPAPERS, A.D. 2000 75

State. A public properly and sufficiently
educated will, with enormous difficulty (because
there is nothing so hard to get rid of as a bad
habit of dependency), gradually undertake the
task of doing for itself by free combination
what at present we try to get done for us by
governmental machinery. One sees how this
sort of thing is gradually evolving, in spite of
the violent efforts of politicians to shove the
world backwards and keep us walking on
crutches instead of strengthening us to walk
alone. Statutes determining the wages of
labourers and the price of commodities are
laughed at as examples of mediaeval foolish-
ness, though (what is exactly the same thing
in principle) Government still interferes with
the freights charged by railway companies,
and indeed is obliged thus to interfere because
it has already gone out of the right way by the
powers it has granted to railway companies.
The new education — the education which
builds character instead of merely diffusing
information (generally useless) — will teach us
the far greater advantages attaching to results
attained by free combination, and the State will
be relieved of many functions at present
regarded as essential to it, and often sought to
be increased.

Now the working of free combination for
the attainment of these results would be
almost impossible without the constant inter-

76 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

change of views which newspapers subserve,
and without careful newsgathering as to the
progress in detail of various schemes and of
public opinion concerning them.

To say that this kind of thing will constitute
the most important class of news is not to
imply that the public will develop an un-
intelligent indifference to news of other kind,
though it is allowable to hope that it will
develop an intelligent indifference to the
trivialities at present solemnly chronicled by
the popular papers. It may be doubted
whether, even now, the public is quite so
passionately interested in the minutice of
murder trials as editors imagine : but with
invention steadily moving on, and its con-
sequences habitually developing in unexpected
ways, there will be plenty of "news" to
chronicle.

Of course the one class of news which is
at once the most expensive and the most help-
ful to a daily paper — I mean its individual
" exclusive " war correspondence — will be
done with by the end of this century. Re-
membering the rate of progress foreseen in the
early part of this work J and the moral nature
of that progress, we may take it as quite certain
that war as an institution will be as obsolete as
gladiators in the year 2000. Even if the in-
creasing amenity of the human race did not
1 Ante, Chapter I.

NO WAR NEWS 77

abolish war, two other things would be certain
to do so. One is the enormous development,
already clearly in sight, of the means of de-
struction : the other the revolt of the peoples
against the stupendous cost, not merely or
chiefly in time of war, but also in time of peace,
of modern armaments. The rising tide of
educated democracy must inevitably banish
war. We have lately, in our own South African
experience, seen how crushingly expensive,
how intolerably impoverishing, a tiny war can
be : and all this is a mere trifle compared with
what it had cost us to be even very ill-prepared
for even such an insignificant combat. This
kind of thing cannot go on for very long
and the peace of Dives ' must soon be
upon us.

But even while war still continues to recur
it is likely that the newspapers will have to
sacrifice many of the advantages which they
at present derive from the intense popular
appetite for the details of organised death.
The war-correspondent, when he can use the
telegraph, is a great nuisance to commanders
in the field, and the increasing difficulties and
importance of modern combat will have the
effect, eventually, of causing generals to forbid
telegraphic communication from the field or its
neighbourhood altogether, on account of the
information, useful to an alert enemy, liable to

1 Kipling : The. Five Nations,

78 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

find its way through the wires. Consequently x
war correspondence will be all under strict
censorship, and will take the form chiefly of
written and photographic descriptions, in a
documentary form, probably conveyed by the
organisation controlled by the fighting army
itself. These may perhaps be telegraphed to
the newspaper office from some intermediate
port when the theatre of war is distant — for
unquestionably we shall, before very long, be
able to telegraph pictures quite as easily as
words. And this brings us face to face with
one of the most interesting and important
developments to be looked for in the vending
of news. Beyond doubt, newspaper illustration
will, in even the near future, be the subject of
great and, in fact, of revolutionary improve-
ment. Every daily paper will be copiously
illustrated, and illustrated in colour. It is easy
to foresee that before many years we shall be

1 It can hardly be disputed that the British generals in
the late war in South Africa would have done well to cut
the cables altogether, or at all events reserve them
exclusively for their own use. There is very good evidence
that, in spite of the interdiction of "coded" messages,
information passed both ways between the enemy and his
agents in Europe. The resolute manner in which the
Japanese kept newspaper correspondents away from the
scene of action until no action remained for them to
correspond about, shows conclusively what will become of
the war-reporter during the few remaining decades which
separate us from the final disappearance of moribund war
itself from the planet*

THE NEWS IN PICTURES 79

able to photograph any object or scene in its
natural colours at one operation. We can
already do so in three, and by the same
number of machinings we can reproduce such
pictures in print, provided we can afford to
print slowly enough and on a sufficiently smooth
paper. The process is in its earliest infancy
as yet. We shall ultimately make it far more
practicable. But even so, printing presses of
the present sort are far too slow for newspaper
use. A hundred years hence magazines and
weekly periodicals may perhaps still be printed
on greatly improved presses ; but daily papers
will be produced by photography alone.
Already the Rontgen rays will print a dozen
or more images at a time on superimposed
sensitive papers. In the next century all that
will be necessary in order to multiply type-
matter and illustrations in any number of
colours will be to place the original on a pile
of paper and expose it to the rays of some
source of energy, when the whole matter will
be impressed upon every sheet, and this not
by any mere contact of type and process-blocks
with paper (which involves serious difficulties,
owing to the interference of the paper-surface
with the grain of the etched " screen ") but by
direct action of light, or of some influence
taking the place of light, so that perfectly clear
pictures will be produced. And news of all sorts
will be the subject of this kind of illustration.

80 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

What will happen will in detail be this.
The teleautoscope x (the instrument by which
sight will be wirelessly telegraphed) will ex-
hibit the actual facts in every newspaper office
from colour-photographs taken on the spot.
What it shows will be rephotographed and re-
produced in colours.

The amount of verbal description needed
will thus be much diminished. Where an event
can be long anticipated — when it is an event
like the Delhi Durbar or the christening of the
Czarewitch, for instance — elaborate prepara-
tions will be made, and very perfect results
published. And difficulties of merely photo-
graphic detail, which at present restrict rapid
photography to events in full sunlight, having
been overcome, and instantaneous photography
by artificial light having been made possible,
such an event as an important theatrical pro-
duction in London will be pictorially reported
in the New York and San Francisco papers
next morning. Where an event is of an unex-
pected character — such as a great fire, a riot,
or some sudden cataclysm of Nature — the
teleautoscope will still be employed with great
advantage. Take, for instance, the case of
some large public building or some theatre
destroyed by fire — though fires will not be so
frequent in the new age as they are to-day.
The local newspaper artists will select from
1 Ante, Chapter III.

THE NEWS IN PICTURES 81

their portfolios photographs of the building
kept on hand for such occasions and get to
work on them with paint-box and colours, de-
picting the progress of what they will perhaps
still cling sufficiently to tradition to call the
"conflagration"; and they will transmit these
efforts when it is not possible to transmit
actual photographs of the event. And of
course, when all is over, the ruins will be
photographed in colours from every desirable
standpoint, and the descriptive photographer
will, in a great measure, supplant the penny-a-
liner. Many pieces of news will doubtless be
photographed from the small one-man air-
carriages, the employment of which, as a
means of recreation, we have already for-
seen.1

The real " news " of the world will therefore
be served up with far more vividness than
even the most feverish present-day journalism
dreams of, and the newspaper will be far
more quickly "read," because long descriptive
articles will have gone out of fashion, and a
series of pictures, occupying much more space,
but apprehended by the mind with far greater
rapidity, will supply their place. Even in
what remains of the printed word I think that
great compression is probable. It must be
remembered that even in the best-educated
parts of England we are hardly through the

1 Ante, Chapter IV.
F

82 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

first generation which universally knows how
to read, and already newspaper-English is
taking on a character of its own, very different
from the " journalese" of the old-fashioned
reporters. By degrees a sort of slang, dis-
tinguished chiefly by brevity and conciseness,
will evolve itself in the newspapers, especially
those published in large towns — though indeed
it is quite evident that in a few years daily
newspapers will be published nowhere else.
This terse, quick language will, after a period
of reprobation, be adopted even by the less
progressive newspapers, at first shocked to
tears of indignant printer's ink by the defile-
ment of the mother tongue, and it will ac-
celerate vastly the task of " running through
the paper," a task which must, even in the
less hurried manners which I foresee for the
future, be made as speedy as possible by the
newspaper that would thrive and increase its
circulation. Thus literature, already restive in
an uncongenial wedlock, will finally obtain
divorce from daily journalism. This does not
mean that literature will perish. On the
contrary, it will develop. And the periodicals
other than newspapers will excel our own in
merit of every sort. They will be permanent,
dignified and, above all, literary. For with
the education of the people really carried to
perfection, and with universal leisure, the result
of improved social arrangements even more

ADVERTISEMENTS, A.D. 2000 83

than of improved mechanical processes, we
shall have a demand for a really intelligent
periodical literature, for really artistic illustra-
tions, which will make it commercially possible
to publish matter that only artificial endow-
ment could support nowadays.

And shall we be content with it ? Certainly
not ; for the new age will still be an age of
progress, and the very perfection of the
periodical Press will be the greatest of all
stimulants to further effort.

Although, in some of their characteristics,
they will be greatly ameliorated, advertise-
ments may very likely still constitute one
ground of discontent with the newspaper of
the future. They sometimes are, in the news-
paper of to-day, the subject of complaint not
altogether reasonable, because if there were no
advertisements there could be no newspapers.
At all events, without this powerful source of
revenue our newspapers could be neither so
cheap nor so liberally conducted as they are ;
and all the economies of the new age will
probably be insufficient to enable newspaper
proprietors to dispense with them. The better
and the more generously-conducted newspapers
are, the more money they spend in the careful
collection, editing, printing and illustrating of
public information, the more dependent they
will become on the revenue from advertising,
which is the sinew of journalism ; and the more

84 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

widely and attentively newspapers are read,
the greater will be the revenue they are able to
command from this source* Moreover, they
would be incomplete without this feature. The
unreflecting newspaper-reader, who anathe-
matises his favourite journal because its weight
and bulk are increased by the presence of
advertisements which he does not want, seldom
takes into account the fact that there are plenty
of his fellow-readers who do want them, or
some of them, and that he himself is often in
the same predicament. Thousands of copies
of newspapers are bought every day in order
to consult advertisements which they are
known to contain. A man who purposes to
take his family to a concert often buys The
Daily Telegraph because he knows that The
Daily Telegraph has more concert announce-
ments in it than any other paper, and that it is
in fact a practically complete directory to all the
current musical opportunities of the Metropolis.
Another man, who wants a secretary, or a
steward for his estate, probably orders The
Times because he knows that the best class of
secretaries and stewards advertise in The
Times for employment. One hardly goes to
the theatre or buys a supply of coals without
looking at the daily paper for information ;
and assuredly this information is not inserted
without being paid for ; in other words, it
forms part of the advertisements. Deprived of

ADVERTISEMENTS, A.D. 2000 85

newspaper advertisements as a way of announc-
ing its need of clerks, warehousemen, labourers
and assistants of all kinds, commerce, even if
it could manage without advertisements of the
sort more commonly thought of when the
nuisance of them is being condemned, could
hardly keep up its organisation at all. Thus,
so far from this feature of our newspapers
being a grievance, it is both directly and in-
directly a boon to all who read them. And
when we remember in addition that the cost of
the paper and printing alone in a copy of most
newspapers exceeds the price at which each
copy is sold by the proprietor, so that the
whole cost of newsgathering, the whole cost of
editing, the fees of contributors and artists,
and the cost of pictures and engraving, as well
as the profit which induces persons to embark
upon an enterprise so troublesome and pre-
carious as newspaper-publishing, must be ob-
tained from the cost of advertisements and
from this alone, we cannot doubt that the
enormously developed newspaper of a hundred
years hence will "give us bold advertisement,"
even as now, and that our descendants will
have the intelligence to be very glad that it
does so.

This being unquestionable, we can hardly
think that we have made a complete forecast of
the newspaper of the future unless we consider
what sort of advertisements it will contain, and

86 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

in order to do this we must consider just what
advertising is likely to be needed in the new age.

As every condition of commerce must
necessarily be affected by the mechanical and
economic developments of another century,
evidently advertising will have to undergo vast
changes in order to adapt itself to new require-
ments. Already competition and the urgent
demand of the public for all possible utilities
and luxuries to be supplied with the greatest
economy of money and trouble have produced
changes in the machinery of supply and de-
mand which must develop at an increasing
speed as time goes on. One tendency of these
things is current talk ; we speak of " eliminating
the middleman." Well, the middleman will
certainly be eliminated by the end of the
century, and one of the forces which will help
to eliminate him is the very force with which,
at present, he endeavours, with a high degree
of transient success, to defend himself — the very
force we have to discuss here ; advertisement.

So long as a population is scattered into
groups in small towns, and hampered by diffi-
culty and expense in transportation, there is an
evident advantage in the retail-shop system.
But we can hardly with convenience remain a
nation of shopkeepers in the present and future
state of concentration and with cheapened trans-
port. It is only necessary to observe the differ-
ent ways in which we supply ourselves with

THE SHOPKEEPER'S FATE 87

commodities, according to where we live, in order
to understand the tendencies at work. In a
village remote from any large town there are
generally one or two general shops, at which a
highly miscellaneous collection of merchandise
is handled. The smaller the village the more
miscellaneous the stock kept at a single trading
establishment. In a small town the shops
differentiate themselves more : but they still
cross the boundary lines of trade, and one gets
tobacco at the chemist's and goes to the draper's
for writing materials and books. When we
come to towns somewhat larger, trades keep
more to themselves, and it is often possible to
find a place where there are no miscellaneous
shops at all, except those owned by the in-
dustrial co-operative societies now so common
and so useful to the thriftier artisans. It is only
when we enter the largest towns and cities of
all that we find large shops divided into de-
partments and again selling almost everything
under one roof.

The conditions in these large towns are an
index to what is likely to occur a hundred
years hence : because (as has already been
seen) towns will certainly grow, and the popula-
tion will become more concentrated, while, even
where improved facilities for travel enable men
to live at a great distance from their work, the
same facilities will enable their wives to do
their shopping in the centres of commerce.

88 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

Consequently, except for a few highly perish-
able commodities, such as milk, butter and the
like, small shopkeepers in residential neigh-
bourhoods will be driven out of business, as
they are in fact already being driven out of it in
the suburbs and dependencies of all large cities.

It is always possible for a large miscellaneous
trader to sell at a smaller percentage of profit
than a trader in a single class of merchandise :
and by his bulkier purchases the former is also
able to start with a lower cost price, and thus
he is in every way better situated to meet the
demand for cheapness. He can also meet the
demand for convenience, because when he is
getting almost the whole trade of a family, even
at some little distance, he can afford to arrange
for the transportation of goods in ways con-
venient to the purchaser. Thus the small
shopkeeper will lose custom in every way and
the large shopkeeper will gain custom. But
there is still a middleman. We have not yet
begun to see how he is to be eliminated, but
only how he is to be limited in his numbers
while being individually pampered with
increased trade.

No one who observes the trend of things,
however, can have failed to note how, from
both sides, the middleman, qua middleman, is
liable to be squeezed out. These very large
retailers tend more and more to become, little
by little, manufacturers instead of merely agents

V H

ADVERTISEMENTS, A.D. 2000 89

for the manufactures of other people, Very
often they are actually forced to this by the
difficulty of obtaining a regular supply of goods
of satisfactory quality from the existing factories.
One of the largest companies doing a miscel-
laneous retailing business has an enormous
estate in the neighbourhood of London covered
with orchards where fruit is grown for sale and
for jam-making ; and it has factories of various
kinds dotted all round the Metropolis, though a
few years ago it was a simple trading concern
which manufactured nothing. On the other
hand, large manufacturers in many trades (of
which the boot trade is an example which must
have come under the notice of every reader)
are tending to open retail shops of their own in
favourable localities, so as to obtain the
retailer's commission as well as the manufac-
turer's profit. Evidently these large manufac-
facturer-shopkeepers are more likely to be
extensive advertisers than small one-shop
retailers.

Another circumstance which will tend to the
increase of advertising is already apparent in
the growing tendency of the public to prefer
branded or packed commodities before bulk
goods. Such groceries as tea, oatmeal and the
like are more and more purchased in packets
bearing a manufacturer's name or trade-mark,
instead of being purchased from bulk and
wrapped up by the grocer. The obvious reason

90 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

is that by this means a housewife can secure a
greater uniformity of quality. She finds that
she likes a certain manufacturer's oatmeal
better than any other, and always buys it ;
whereas if she bought bulk-oatmeal she would
have the product now of one mill, now of
another, and these products would vary. The
only way in which a manufacturer can call
attention to his speciality is to advertise it.
The immediate consequence of this move-
ment is the degradation of the retailer, who
ceases to be the custodian (so to speak) of
his customers' interest and becomes a mere
hander-out of packed specialities. It is not
very likely that every manufacturer of such
specialities will become a retailer with shops
everywhere ; but it is practically certain that
trusts will be formed on a sort of co-operative
principle by combinations of manufacturers, who
will divide among themselves the expense of
organisation and obtain the whole profit without
having to share it with any middleman. And in
many departments of commerce the elimination
of the retailer will be secured by the utilisation
of improved transport, orders being received at
the works by letter or telephone and executed
direct from manufacturer to consumer. Such
business can only be stimulated through adver-
tisement, and the newspaper of the future con-
stitutes the most convenient medium for such
advertisement.

ADVERTISEMENTS, A.D. 2000 91

The intrinsic nature of the vastly-extended
advertising of the new age will be influenced
by the new growth of public intelligence. Once
almost wholly, and now to a very great extent,
addressed to the least intelligent faculties of the
public — the faculties most liable to be influenced
by large type and ad captandum phrasing — ad-
vertising will in the future world become gradu-
ally more and more intelligent in tone. It will
seek to influence demand by argument instead
of clamour, a tendency already more apparent
every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks
and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they
are already being greatly replaced, by serious
exposition ; and advertisements, instead of being
mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be
made interesting and informative, so that they
will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and
it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to
publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as
for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek
custom by telling lies to his customers. Skilful
writers will be employed upon the work, and
skilful journalists will think it no derogation
from their dignity to be employed in the writing
of commercial advertisements. No doubt the
methods of illustration employed in journalism
proper will also be pressed into the service of
the advertiser, and in this, as in other respects,
our " divine discontent " will still look for im-
provements, and the newspaper of the future

92 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

will be a vast improvement upon the newspaper
of to-day.

Although the distinction between journalism
and literature is likely to define itself more
and more sharply — periodicals growing more
literary, and newspapers less literary — it is
here convenient to pause for a moment on the
question of the direction in which literature is
likely to develop — meaning especially imagin-
ative literature and poetry. The past of this
development, widely considered, has been, of
course, since the close of the eighteenth century,
from the classical, through the romantic, to the
realistic school ; and the last has been associated
with a greatly-increased and minute considera-
tion of language as an implement of exact and
elegant expression. Literature has become,
and will no doubt continue to be, increasingly
self-conscious. Happy effects are deliberately
sought for. Felicity of phrase is no longer a
matter of unconscious, almost accidental, accom-
plishment ; it is purposefully and deliberately
obtained. We no longer expect inspiration
from the Muses, but climb Parnassus with
arduous consciousness of our meritorious
pedestrianism. The methodical, scientific
orderliness of modern thought has, in short,
invaded even the field of art, and we have
sometimes an air of trying to make of literature
an exact process. Perhaps very great literature,
and certainly, according to all precedent, very

JOURNALISM, A.D. 2000 93

great poetry, cannot be produced in that way.
There is something of mystery about them,
something of the instinctive, of the elemental,
or, to speak with a more critical exactness, of
the spiritual. And the development and
circumstances of very elaborate civilisation do
not wholly favour the spiritual. But to conclude
from this that great poetry will never again be
written would be to overlook one of the dis-
turbing, the cataclysmal factors of human life.
This factor is one of the greatest pitfalls of the
would-be prophet. By examining the past, one
could predict almost unfailingly the future, if
there were not always, and in every department
of life, the strange, incalculable thing which, for
want of a better name, we call genius, to be
reckoned with, to be almost alarmed by. We
may examine, we may reason, we may reckon
up almost anything ; but athwart all our con-
jectures, charm we never so wisely, comes
genius, and revolutionises everything ! 1 1 is the
one thing which no formula can embrace. Not
in the realms of literature and art alone will it
break in and stultify our best prevision. In
every department of life we must tread
cautiously, aware that no one who would fore-
cast the future can afford to neglect its disturb-
ing possibilities. We must prayerfully and
joyously expect that from time to time genius
will suddenly arrive and pass across the stage,
changing everything, bringing to naught our

94 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

cunningest anticipations ; and as it is peculiarly
the quality of literature to be thus perturbed
and regenerated, we must not even attempt to
predict what schools the literature of the future
will pass through. The only thing we can be
certain of is that from time to time some epoch-
making mind will express itself. Acquainted
with all the devices of the schools it will brush
them all aside, and half unconsciously, half a-
dream, as if indeed it were literally "inspired,"
it will establish new standards, engender new
methods, and endow the time with new delights.
Criticism will dissect, examine and explain,
until the creative mind is almost persuaded
that it has all along understood itself; but the
one thing by which criticism must ever be
eluded, the one thing which must ever elude
prophecy, is genius itself. When all is said
that man can say, and all is said in vain, the
best explanation of the unexplainable is perhaps
the old one, that genius brings in some way a
message from outside the world. Perhaps,
since there is always a demand for something
which man can worship, this inspiration may be
the subject of the conscious adoration of the
new age. Perhaps we have here the subject
of the religion of the future ; for inspiration, as
we may most conveniently name this mystery,
has just that character of the unknowable half-
seized, which is precisely what the soul of man
is ever yearning for.

CHAPTER VI

UTILISING THE SEA

EXCEPT for a small tribute in the shape of fish
food and certain salts the ocean is to-day almost
a dead loss to the world, and what is worse,
the greatest of all obstacles to progress. It
separates us from our kin, wrecks our ships,
claims a yearly toll of dead, and is barren,
fruitless, a mere receptacle for garbage. A
hundred years hence we shall have awakened
to these facts and found means to make "the
caverns vast of ocean old" something better
than a subject for the poet and a resting-place
for the dead whom it murders.

Not every dream, however, can be realised —
not even the engineer's. Some years ago
certain ardent spirits in France announced that
the desert of Sahara lay below the level of the
sea and could be flooded with the Atlantic or
Mediterranean. The effect of this, it was con-
sidered, would not merely be to inconvenience
certain Arabs, but to change entirely the climate
of the rest of equatorial Africa. Laved by the
beneficent waves of ocean, lands at present

95

96 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

uninhabitable would, it was declared, become
fertile and salubrious. The project was dis-
missed or shelved as impracticable from
engineering difficulties. Shall we, a hundred
years hence, have met these difficulties ?

Probably not. To work such changes in the
distribution of land and water will be a thing
not indeed beyond the power of the next
century's engineers, but beyond their daring.
The accomplishment of them might, if at all
rapid, be attended by frightful disasters, some of
which can be readily estimated, but of which the
worst would probably remain unforeseen and
unimagined until the irrevocable moment of
fulfilment. To increase to this extent the area
of the world's oceans, without increasing (as of
course we could not increase) their mass, would
perceptibly lower the level of the sea every-
where, and in accordance with the well-known
hydrostatic law things would " right them-
selves " on a cataclysmal scale. Every narrow
strait in the world, every oceanic canal would
become, for the time being, a roaring cataract.
The Mediterranean would rush tumultuously
out through the Straits of Gibraltar and the
Suez Canal, and the overflow would flood the
adjacent lands. The Straits of Dover would
roar like Niagara, and all Kent, and the low-
lying north-east corner of France, would be
devastated. The isthmus of Panama might at
the same time be swept away, for the narrow

UTILISING THE SEA 97

banks of the completed Panama Canal would
certainly give way before the weight of the
two oceans. All the rivers of the world would
rush down in spate until they ran nearly dry
from the increased outfall. The sea would
recede from all the coasts. Along with this
fall in the level of the sea would come tempests
such as, since the appearance of man on the
planet, the world has never known. For the
sea-supported atmosphere would suck into its
vacuum the whole weight of the over-lying
air until pressure was equalised. And the
climate of all the world would be reconstituted
in new and probably inconvenient ways.

No. We cannot venture thus to change
the face of creation. What we can and shall
do is to make the best of it. In a hundred
years' time many countries at present un-
developed will be rich and populous. Canada,
for one example, has an area greater than that
of the United States, with a population
smaller than the population of Greater London.
And Canada, endowed as it is with almost
every source of wealth, will before long become
perhaps the richest country in the world. By
this time next century it will also be one of
the most populous. Siberia, again, with many
fertile and salubrious tracts, will certainly have
been more intelligently utilised than by making
a vast prison of it. But when all the regions
available for human habitation are populated

98 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

and made use of, the centres of civilisation
will probably lie very much where they lie
now ; and here the congested populations will
have found that they can no longer tolerate
the waste of a neglected ocean. As we push
outward from the centre of the continents,
the seaboard will have to be utilised and
extended. There is nothing to daunt the
engineers of a hundred years hence in the
project of erecting on the sea a vast floating
city, fully as convenient as the present cities of
terra firma, and, while vastly more healthful,
quite substantial enough to resist storm and
every motion of the sea, except the tides on
which the city will rise and fall — tides which
will no doubt furnish the motive power of
many conveniences in ocean cities.

There are great advantages in a city thus
founded, as compared with those we at present
inhabit ; and we certainly shall not be able to
neglect them. There will be no particular
reason for economy of space or for insalubrious
overcrowding (since the sea has no landlord),
and breadth would make for stability as well
as for convenience. Urban traffic will employ
an entirely new light vehicle, the skimmer.
It has been mentioned as a thing beyond
doubt that the ships of a hundred years hence
will no longer float in the sea, but ride on its
surface, thus evading both the instability and
the resistance at present so troublesome to

OCEAN CITIES 99

marine engineers. As soon as the necessity
arises for providing street traffic in the ocean
city — when "the sea is in the broad, the
narrow streets, ebbing and flowing, and the
salt weed clings to the marble of her palaces "
—invention will meet the demand, and light
street waggons and carriages will everywhere
glide about, performing the daily needs of the
inhabitants. Something in the nature of break-
waters will provide against wave-play and
form an unequalled exterior boulevard ; and
by means of an invention which will long since
have been called for by the requirements of
other localities, the air of dwelling-houses in
the ocean city will be wholesomely freed from
damp.

For we shall certainly not have failed to
act upon our knowledge of the fact that
irregularities in the proportion of atmospheric
moisture are responsible for the unhealthiness
of certain areas ; and we shall have learned,
by means of the anhydrator, to provide any
place with exactly the degree of damp or dry-
ness necessary to health. The same apparatus,
by desiccating the air to the extreme point,
will keep the houses of an ocean city dry and
thus do away with an objection which would
make homes built on the water insufferable
to-day.

If we have not wholly reformed throughout
the world our system of land tenure, the

100 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

conquered ocean will unquestionably relieve
the tension which is created by it, and perhaps
a radical change of this character will only
become possible when the enormous advan-
tages of it have been practically exemplified.

But there is another way in which the
conquest of ocean ought to prove a great
economic boon to the world. Except in the
case of a few coal mines, with shafts sunk
near the sea beach, we have hardly at all
begun to investigate the contents of the ocean
floor. There is, so far as I am aware, no
particular reason to doubt that the constitution
of the subterranean world is in most respects
very much the same under the sea as under
the land. Probably vast riches, as yet un-
dreamed of, lie below the surface of the ocean
and beneath its floor. There can be no
question that the needs of the world will make
us eager to tap them, as we should already
have begun to, if any way could be dis-
covered of overcoming the engineering
difficulties involved. These difficulties, in the
present state of our knowledge, may well appal
the stoutest imagination. The problem pre-
sented by the immense and paralysing air pres-
sure in a mine at this great depth would have to
be overcome. Even in some great terrestrial
excavations already made the problem occurs :
and where (as in river tunnels and elsewhere)
men attempt to work in great air-pressures

THE WEALTH OF THE SEA 101

artificially induced, the phenomenon called
caisson- disease occasions practical difficulty.
But the mere fact of an achievement being
almost inconceivable in the light of present
knowledge and invention must not be allowed
to put a clog upon a forecast of what next
century may attain. It is a hypothesis which
the reader has been invited to accept, not
merely that discovery and invention will go
on, but that they will go at a constantly-in-
creasing pace. We must not, therefore, allow
what may well seem, at the present day,
insuperable engineering difficulties to forbid
the belief that the undiscovered wealth of the
earth below the sea will be tapped for the
benefit of the new age. What minerals may
lie there, a rich heirloom for the coming time,
we can but roughly imagine. But enterprise
and the world's necessities will spur us on to
search them out, until the new people, deriving
like a fresh Antaeus constant stores of strength
from Mother Earth, will enter into possessions
which must vastly relieve their necessities.
Individual enterprise will solve the problems
and reap its store of profits. But the ocean is
no-man's land, and the people — perhaps a
world-people, for this purpose at least not sub-
divided into antagonistic communities — will
beyond doubt take toll, for the relief of general
taxation, from the earnings of the new
mineralogy.

102 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

In other ways, too, the sea itself will be
made use of. We shall get our salt from it,
the process of separation being electrolytic.
Fish will probably be eaten later than any
other form of animal food. But the chief gift
of the sea to the life of the future will be the
two gases of which water is composed —
oxygen and hydrogen : and the other gas,
chlorine, which forms half the salt, as well as
the metal sodium which forms the other half,
will probably have many new uses found for
them. Liquefied oxygen will no doubt be our
sole disinfectant. It will also replace the
poisonous, noisome and destructive bleaching
agents used to-day. Hydrogen, the lightest
of all gases, will be another staple of commerce.
It will (as we have elsewhere seen) probably
be the only fuel employed, for its combustion
furnishes the greatest heat terrestrially known,
and its flame is smokeless and yields no
poisonous by-product. Moreover, the evapora-
tion of liquid hydrogen, by a sort of curious
revenge, produces the greatest available cold.
If anything in the nature of balloons should
survive the century hydrogen will inflate them,
and both our hydrogen and our oxygen will
most likely be got by preference from the sea.
There are many reasons for this preference.
Probably there will be some advantage in the
matter of expense, since the salts of ocean
water would be a by-product of the operation,

THE WEALTH OF THE SEA 103

and it is conceivable that a use may be found
for the rarer among them, which could only
be obtained in satisfactory quantities by
reducing to dryness huge amounts of water.
And potable or spring waters will perhaps be
too precious a commodity to be consumed
unnecessarily. Distilled water could no doubt
be used for drinking purposes, and bacterio-
logically it is of course unexceptionable ; but
there are certain objections to it, and though
these may doubtless be overcome, natural
waters have a value which cannot be ignored.

Thus the oceans of the world, as yet mere
watery deserts, useful to hardly a calculable
percentage of the people (and then only at
the expense of the rest) will have become the
world's inheritance, and its hoarded wealth
will stave off the time — whose coming we must
not ignore — when our world-capital begins to
be exhausted. For that time must come. We
are living upon the hoards which the womb of
our mother the earth has borne to our father
the sun. But our mother is, in respect at all
events of mineral wealth, past the age of
conception ; and every century brings us more
rapidly near to the time when we shall, like
spendthrifts, have lived out our capital.
Already the end of coal is in sight. When,
at the end of a vista however long, we begin
to be able to foresee the exhaustion of other
minerals, we shall face a problem appalling in

104 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

its nature. Perhaps before our store of heat
gives out and reduces earth to the state of
a dead world like the moon, we shall already
have exhausted our stock. No economies in
the use of scrap metal and the re-employment
of the material of machines which have been
superseded can save us from ultimate metallic
bankruptcy in a future calculated perhaps in
thousands (but not many thousands) of years.
Our only succour seems to lie in a conception
for which (despite the efforts of some lively
thinkers who have been obliged to ignore
all but the least important difficulties of the
subject) we have no material — the conception
of means by which the cold depths of in-
terplanetary space may be traversed. Even
if we allow imagination, untrammelled by the
most evident necessities of the case, to suggest
a speed of transport computable only by
astronomical analogies, we still lag behind
anything which could serve this purpose,
unless we concurrently believe that human
life shall, by that time, be lengthened into
centuries. Otherwise, however recklessly we
may conceive of speed in interplanetary travel,
man would almost require to live for many cen-
turies in order to reach and return from any
destination which would not inevitably destroy
him by fire or cold when he arrived at it.
Most likely man is for ever destined to accept
the bounds of his own planet, and to be limited

THE WEALTH OF THE SEA 105

by its resources. In order that these resources
may be utilised to the uttermost of his needs,
the contents of the ocean floor must un-
doubtedly be laid under contribution, and
probably we shall not antedate this achieve-
ment if we consider that it will have been at
least entered upon a hundred years hence.

CHAPTER VII

THE MARCH OF SCIENCE

IN a forecast like the present it is impossible
to avoid a certain amount of overlapping in
different sections of the subject and a certain
blending of topics in a single chapter. The
attempt to differentiate consistently between
the progress of science as science, and the
concurrent advance of practical invention by
which scientific discovery is turned to use
would only involve needless repetition. I
have already had occasion to suggest elements
of material progress which presuppose the
advance in pure science that would make them
possible. Thus, in endeavouring to suggest
what the methods of commerce and the con-
dition of our cities are likely to be in the
future it was necessary to conceive certain
advances in our knowledge of what is rather
clumsily called " wireless" telegraphy, and to
predict the discovery of new and cheap
methods of analysing water into its component
gases as a source of fuel and as means for
the production of electricity : and in order

1 06

THE MARCH OF SCIENCE 107

to avoid useless repetition it was found con-
venient to work out in a rough manner the
various ways in which the cheap and inex-
haustible supplies of hydrogen and oxygen
which I have imagined discovery to have
placed at the disposal of invention would be
employed in the arts. Similarly, when we
interrogate imagination on the subject of
scientific discovery itself, we shall be forced
to think chiefly of the practical results likely
to be achieved by it, and indeed there would
otherwise be hardly any purpose to serve by
the effort. What imports the greatest amount
of complexity into the subject is the difficulty
of conceiving the lines upon which science
is likely to travel, unless we allow ourselves
to be guided by the practical requirements of
the future as far as we are able to foresee them.
Imagination has indeed superabundant room
in which to run riot when it endeavours to give
form to the probabilities of scientific discovery;
and the only danger is that effort may be wasted
in purely fanciful directions, if it be not pretty
securely tied down by some such artificial re-
straint as the convention of keeping more or
less strictly to the anticipation of discoveries
likely to have immediate practical application.

For instance, there is hardly any end to the
developments we might allow ourselves to
imagine as arising out of the new theories,
still in a probationary condition, as to the

108 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

ultimate physical structure of the universe.
Such conjectures might be followed indefinitely
in several directions, and the resulting con-
clusions would be more likely to err by
timidity than by extravagance : but as there
is no knowledge at present available which
could serve as a guide to the probably-right,
and as a warning against the probably-wrong,
directions, it would be neither interesting nor
useful to pursue them. Radium " the revealer,"
as Dr Saleeby has called it in one of those
brilliant papers which fine imagination and
delicate fancy have adorned with many another
noble phrase and memorable image, opens the
door to a whole world of new possibilities.
Our whole conception of cosmic processes may
have to be remodelled, in the light of those
tiny scintillations which the spinthariscope
has popularised. Already our notions con-
cerning the nature of matter have been
revolutionised. We are told that atoms, re-
garded hitherto as the ultimate units of matter
— so small that Lord Kelvin has calculated
that if a drop of water were magnified to
the size of the earth the atoms in it would
be somewhere between the size of small shot
and the size of cricket balls — are themselves
made up of a stuff so almost infinitely more
tenuous, that the particles of it within the
atom are, relatively to their size, farther apart
than the planets of the solar system. Nor is

THE MARCH OF SCIENCE 109

this all. These particles, commonly called
electrons, if particles they can still be
designated at all, were at first said to " carry "
a charge of electricity. But it now seems
that they are electricity itself. If this be
true, we should seem to be on the point
of bridging the void between what used to
be called the eternal antithetics — matter and
force : and whither this will lead us can only
with the greatest caution be pre-imagined. In
any case the consequences of this discovery,
philosophical as well as scientific, are stupefy-
ing in the possibilities they open up to the
thinker as well as to the man of practical
science. At last science begins to join hands
with philosophy. What will be the philosophy
of a hundred years hence, imagination pales
before the effort of attempting to conceive.

But the working out of the revelations
promised by radiology belongs rather to this
end of the century than to the other. During
the interval there can be no doubt that
electricity, already man's chief handmaid, will
have increased and perhaps completed her
services to the race. When, as I ventured
to suggest in a former chapter, inexhaustible
and cheap " current " is yielded to us by some
method of utilising the electrical reciprocity
of the hydrogen and oxygen gases derived
from water, doubtless all machinery will be
electrically driven, all transport electrically

110 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

propelled. Perhaps this discovery lies so far
in the foreground of the future as to be
irrelevant to any anticipations of the world's
condition a hundred years hence. The full
development of electrically-driven machinery
lies in the middle distance, and the duration
of the electrical age can hardly be pre-
calculated with any greater exactness than
the suggestion that it will probably have
reached, or at all events approached, its end
in about a century's time.

The most important problem connected with
this subject is to imagine, if we can, how electri-
cal power will be applied. It is quite evident
that the device of long conductors, either over-
head or below ground — the "live wires" of
alarmed America — is too clumsy and too danger-
ous to be long tolerated. It is indeed a public
scandal that cables carrying an electrical charge
capable of killing or paralysing at a touch should
be suspended over the heads of the citizens, ex-
posed to momentary breakage by snowfall, high
wind, or the inevitable wear which careless
inspectors may overlook : and the mere fact
that a horse can occasionally set foot on a
ground plate and fall dead from the contact
shows that even the vaunted " conduit system "
must not be regarded as anything but a strictly-
temporary device. Some of the dangers of the
underground electric wires arise out of the use
of our present illuminating gas, when a pipe

ELECTRICITY AND AFTER 111

leaks into a manhole or inspection chamber,
forming an explosive mixture of gas and air,
which presently becomes ignited by an electric
spark and blows up the whole affair. No doubt
coal gas is within easily measurable distance of
its end as a convenience of civilisation. But it
is extremely probable that hydrogen and oxygen
will be conveyed by mains to houses and public
buildings during a long time : and it is hardly
possible to believe that the mains will not some-
times leak and be capable of letting out mix-
tures far more dangerous on ignition than the
mixture of coal gas and air, and still more
dangerous because neither of the gases, nor the
mixture of them, has any smell, unless indeed
we should take the precaution of giving them
one artificially. Whatever we may do, and we
shall do much, to minimise the dangers of
highly-evolved civilisation, accidents will always
occur, and their violence will probably increase.
We must pay our toll to the conveniences of
life, and we shall of course compensate ourselves
by a lower death-rate from diseases, many of
which will no doubt in a hundred years' time
have disappeared from the planet.

If we need any motive power other than
electricity, or if we need motive power of some
other kind to produce electricity, no doubt the
explosive recombination of oxygen and hydro-
gen, controlled by devices developed from
existing gas-engines and petrol-engines, will be

112 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

a starting-point : because coal will, probably
before the complete exhaustion of the supply
of it, have been found altogether too dirty and
unhealthy a thing to use, at all events by way
of combustion, though rumours are heard from
time to time of new methods by which the
stored energy of coal may be utilised directly,
to the great economy of the material.1 In all
sorts of ways the early years of the century
will be employing themselves in seeking out
new sources of man's chief necessity — power :
and a hundred years hence we shall have
entered upon the full inheritance of them.

But the obtaining of power is only one prob-
lem of the mechanician. Of almost equal, if
not quite equal, importance is that of applying
power at the place where it is needed, and the
careful reader will not have overlooked the fact
that while we have been discussing the use of
electricity as a source of power we have already
been anticipating, and perhaps anticipating a
good deal. For, when we now speak of
machinery and locomotive engines being
" driven" by electricity, we are really only em-
ploying a sort of convenient periphrasis. All
our electric machinery, all our electric railways,
our " tuppeny " tubes and the horrible electric
trams which make life almost intolerable in
houses along many of the main roads out of
London, are really driven by coal-burning steam
1 Ante, page 7.

THE PROBLEM OF POWER 113

engines. In a few places (especially in the
Niagara valley) waterfall power is used. But
whatever the real source of power, electricity
is only a means, more or less convenient, of
transmitting it. Even electric launches, and
slow-going electric broughams driven by ac-
cumulators, only represent slightly more subtle
examples of the electrical transmission of power.
The ultimate source of power is always either
a steam-engine or a waterfall. A few lecture-
table toys and the like are the only existing
examples of machinery in which the actual
source of power is electricity. Even here, it
may be objected, the actual source of power is
not electricity, but chemical action in the bat-
tery. But no contrivance of man is an ultimate
source of power. Even a steam-engine is only
a device for utilising the stored solar energy of
coal. Of course man can no more create power
than he can create matter : the stock of each in
the universe is a fixed quantity. All that we
are able to do is to harness to our use a part of
the cosmic store. When I speak of electricity
becoming hereafter a " source " of power, I am
merely distinguishing between its use as a
means of transmitting force already perceived
as force in some other form (as where a dynamo-
electric machine receives motion from a steam-
engine or waterfall and turns this motion into
electricity, which is conveyed by wires or rails
to an electric dynamic engine that reconverts

H

114 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

it into motion) and its use as a primary means
of utilising the cosmic stores of force.

Before we arrive, therefore, at the point of
using electricity as a source of power in itself,
our mechanicians will have plenty to occupy
them in the task of devising safer and more
convenient methods of transmitting force, and
even at the end of the century, supposing the
use of electricity not to have been entirely
superseded by the discovery of some entirely
new force as yet not even conceivable, invention
will doubtless be still busy with further im-
provements in the transmission as well as in
the production of electricity. It has been hinted
that " wireless " transmission of power will no
doubt by that time have become practicable,
and Signor Marconi's achievement of wireless
telegraphy was mentioned as a proof that such
transmission is at least imaginable. In Mar-
coni's invention an enormous electrical impulse
is launched into the aether, and if the very
smallest token of it can be " picked up " in any
way at the receiving station, the wireless tele-
gram is satisfactorily received. But the im-
portant fact for our present purpose is that some
product of the original impulse can be picked
up : and though the effort of imagination
required to see in this a starting-point for en-
tirely new inventions, capable of gathering up
a practicable modicum of the transmitted power
in a form capable of being converted into motion,

THE PROBLEM OF POWER 115

is severe, we shall bring but a poor imagina-
tive equipment to a task so colossal as that of
guessing what the next century will be capable
of if we refuse to believe that something in the
nature of Hertzian waves, or something propa-
gated as these are propagated, can be used to
carry impulse to machinery at a distance from
the source of power. The imaginative faculty
which boggles at this effort will probably over-
look the fact that the mere transmission is only
a part of the difficulty which is pretty sure to
have been overcome by this time next century.
It will not be enough to launch waves capable
of being used where they are intended to be
used. We must also discover how to launch
them so that they may be incapable of being
used anywhere else. I read the other day the
report of a police-court case in which a man
was charged with " stealing electricity " (which
seems a rather doubtful indictment from the
point of view of the lawyer) by obtaining the
use of a public telephone station without paying
the usual fee. The electricians of a hundred
years hence will certainly have to find out how
to prevent the purloining of wireless force, and
perhaps the police will have to devise means
of detecting this at present somewhat recondite
crime. This question of wireless transmission
lies within the province of discovery rather than
that of invention. Before it can receive actu-
ality we have to do more than utilise existing

116 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

knowledge : we have to acquire new know-
ledge.

In the meantime, portable energy will no
doubt be achieved in ways other than electrical.
Some very interesting compressed-air tools are
already in limited use. Holes are drilled and
rivets driven by little contrivances which have
a store of force within themselves furnished
by compressed air. One of the many uses of
the cheap oxygen and hydrogen, and doubtless
of cheaply liquefied gases of high-resisting
power,1 will no doubt be to work various kinds
of machinery. This use of liquid airs has been
much derided, and indeed a good deal of non-
sense has been written as to its possibilities,
drawing from a recent and accomplished writer
the remark that " The statements which have
sometimes appeared in the daily papers,
announcing impending revolutions in the
methods of obtaining cheap power by the
application of liquid air, have originated from
an imperfect comprehension of the problems
involved."2

In present conditions, and so far as we are
able to see at present, liquefied gases are for a

1 That is to say, the gases which are most difficult to
liquefy, and which consequently store up most energy in
liquefying, viz., hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, as distin-
guished from ammonia, carbon-dioxide,[chlorine, and other
gases relatively easy to liquefy.

2 The Recent Development of Physical Science. By W. C.
Whetham, F.R.S., 1904. London: John Murray.

WHAT MAY WE HOPE FOR? 117

long time not likely to serve any greater
mechanical purpose than that of furnishing a
highly portable apparatus by which great power
can be developed for a short time at any
required place. It is easy to believe that it
could not be otherwise employed with any
economy, even when discovery has greatly
simplified the now difficult process of lique-
faction. But in regard to this matter, and to
almost every other mechanical and engineering
improvement suggested in the present work, it
is of the first importance to remember that the
conditions in which the work of the world a
hundred years hence will be done are certain
to differ very greatly from anything we know
to-day ; and that procedures at present not
merely out of proportion, but in themselves
actually chimerical, will become perfectly work-
able in the new circumstances of another
century. No doubt the problems at present
involved make many of the developments
herein suggested almost laughable to those
who examine the subject without imagination.
But what could have been thought of a man
who, when Oersted discovered the influence of
a battery current on the compass needle,
suggested that the discovery might, in much
less than a hundred years, be practically de-
veloped in such unforeseen ways as to pro-
duce locomotive machines capable of carrying
vast weight at a speed of perhaps a hundred

118 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

miles an hour? He would have been told that
such predictions " could only have originated
from an imperfect comprehension of the
problems involved." But we know that they
would have been perfectly sound, though it
would have been difficult to withhold assent
from the derision which instructed hearers
would have poured upon them. The effect of
any scientific discovery can only be measured
when we are in a position to judge of the con-
ditions in which it may be applied, and the
further discoveries which may affect it — a con-
sideration which will help us against the danger
of undue caution in estimating the possible
developments of recent discovery when utilised
in the conditions of the next century and re-
inforced by inventions and discoveries yet to
come,

A like caution will, however, teach us to
restrain our expectations from the new know-
ledge which radium appears to be gradually
unfolding, not because there is any doubt that
radio-activity will ultimately bring priceless
gifts to civilisation, but because in our present
ignorance of all but a few facts concerning it
we can form no possible conjecture as to the
lines these gifts will follow. Already we seem
to have seen in some of the radium experi-
ments one " element" turn into another. If
this should develop until we acquire the power
which used to be dreamed of as transmutation,

THE MARCH OF SCIENCE 119

the social and economic upheavals which would
result beggar imagination.1

The photographic effect of Rontgen rays has
already 2 been the subject of a suggestion, and
even the facts now remotest from practical use
in connection with the rays of various sorts so
much discussed in the scientific newspapers
will no doubt be utilised in a manner or in
manners far removed from the limited employ-
ment in therapeutics already found for them.

And indeed medicine, not the most progres-
sive of modern sciences, will no doubt make
vast strides during the period under discussion.

It would be altogether fallacious to forecast
the position and probable achievements of
medical science in a century's time on the line
of simple development from the practice of to-
day. The changes will be revolutionary rather
than evolutionary. When it is remembered
that only fifty years ago limbs were hacked

1 I do not forget that a good deal of what is on record
as an account of experiments in transmutation is purely
mystical writing, and that when Paracelsus and some of the
French alchemists describe what appear to be chemical
experiments they are in reality referring to something quite
different. But the learned in these matters tell me that
one of their chief difficulties arises from the fact that, con-
temporary with the mystics, there were other investigators
who, not having the key to the occult significance of the
masters' writings, really devoted themselves to research,
some valuable, if accidental, results of which have come
down to us and are recorded in all text-books of chemistry.

2 Ante, page 79.

120 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

from the quivering flesh of the sentient patient,
held down by muscular assistants lest the
violent struggles of his agony should embarrass
the surgeon, and that wounds of all sorts
festered and decayed until a hospital reeked
with their impurity — in other words, that dis-
coveries so great as anaesthesia and antisepsis
are well within living memory — we need not
hesitate to predict for the present century
changes in medical and surgical science almost
inconceivable by the light of our present attain-
ment. Anaesthetics — of which the local kinds,
as cocaine and eucaine, are of entirely recent
use — represent an advance in one direction.
Antiseptic surgery, which is the prevention
and correction of blood and wound-poisoning
by chemical disinfectants, represented an ad-
vance of a different kind. But antisepsis is
already on the point of being superseded by
the far more rational and scientific method of
asepsis, or the exclusion from open wounds of
all the germs which can set up inflammation
and festering. The change is typical.

The direction in which medicine is chiefly
working at the present time is that of intro-
ducing into the body one disease with the
idea of excluding other diseases. It is con-
ceived that cow-pox is antagonistic to small-pox,
erysipelas possibly to cancer, and so on. All
the talk in medical circles is of serum and
attenuated virus. And, apart from animal

MEDICINE AND SURGERY 121

products administered by injection, we cure or
attempt to cure all diseases by administering
poisons — animal, vegetable or mineral. Just
as by antiseptics we poison the germ which
causes festering and inflammation, so by drugs
we attempt to poison disease — for all drugs are
practically poisons. The principle of their
administration is almost wholly empirical. If
you ask a doctor why phenacetin reduces fever,
it is impossible to get beyond a metaphysical
explanation. He will reply that phenacetin
reduces fever by lowering the blood pressure,
or something of that kind. But this merely
re-states the problem. Why does phenacetin
lower blood pressure ? We do not know.
The substitution of asepsis for antisepsis — that
is, of cleanliness for disinfection — has hardly
yet been perceived to be in a certain sense the
greatest advance in therapeutics since Hippo-
crates. It probably contains the germ of
future medical treatment. Hereafter we shall
not try to cast out devils of disease by other
disease-germs only less devilish. We shall
learn enough of the causes of disease to stop
them at their source, and knowledge growing
from more to more, which has taught us exactly
how " matter in the wrong place " — of whatever
sort — is the source of all disease, will also show
how matter may generally be kept in its right
place.

Although comparatively little progress has

122 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

been made by the curative use of rays, other
discoveries, of which we have even now passed
the brink, will have an enormous effect on
medicine and surgery. Already certain kinds
of light cure rodent ulcer, one of the most
hideous and terrible diseases, not by the im-
portation of fresh substances into the body
but by the modification of the tissues them-
selves. When radiation has been fully studied
it will almost certainly be found that the sun,
which is the source of practically all terrestrial
activity, has been showering upon us, ever since
the homogeneous vapour which was the birth-
stuff of the universe aggregated itself into
worlds and suns and planets, rays which are
capable of correcting every sort of disease-
germination and, properly used, of preventing
it. The absolute deadliness of unmodified
sunlight to many sorts of disease - germs is
recognised already. The value of sun-baths
— the exposure of the whole body, undraped
or only lightly covered, to the sunlight — is
already discussed in connection with anaemia,
chlorosis and the early stages of consumption.
When we know just where all disease origin-
ates, and why it develops, it seems likely that
sunlight and oxygen its child will prevent
nearly all disease and cure whatever disease
accidentally arises. In place of temporary
and dangerous expedients like antiseptics,
serum and corrective poisons, we shall im-

MEDICINE AND SURGERY 123

port nothing into the human organism, but
only exclude what ought to be kept out, and
modify into innocuousness what has found its
way in.

A great part of the disease we call consti-
tutional, as distinguished from infective, arises
from food, either because the food itself is not
free from disease, or because, from excess in
quantity or error in choice, the food we take
sets up the production of poisons in the course
of digestion, and by yielding, for instance,
lactic or uric acid to the blood causes rheumatism
or gout, or by introducing into the stomach
matter in a state of incipient decay, favours
typhoid and other fevers.

When, for reasons already indicated, animal
food has been eliminated from the menu one
great source of disease will have been got rid
of.

When we completely understand the nature
of the infective and contagious diseases it seems
well within the bounds of possibility that the
systematic destruction of their germs may be
carried far enough to remove them altogether
from the planet.1 We have now, even by the

1 1 might have " boggled " (to use one of Mr Andrew
Lang's stately colloquialisms) before this suggestion, but
for a remark by Dr C. W. Saleeby, which may here be
quoted, to keep me in countenance. "Malaria," he
writes in Nova Medica^ Nov. 1904, "which causes more
illness than any other disease, is already obsolescent.
Tuberculosis, which causes more deaths than any other

124 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

highly imperfect measure of quarantine and a
period of muzzling (from which, on no evident
ground except that it would interfere with the
amusements of the governing class to include
them, sporting dogs were excluded), apparently
banished hydrophobia from Great Britain. If
it prove to be the case that just as hydrophobia
cannot arise spontaneously, but requires to be
"started" by the entry into the blood of an
animal of an existing infection, other infective
diseases require pre-existing disease before
they can arise, we may get rid of them
altogether. The dream may appear a wild
one. But it is not wilder than the dreams
of a thinker who anticipated any one of a
hundred common facts of to-day must have
appeared to our great-great-grandfathers.

It is, of course, not to be supposed that
disease can altogether be banished from a
world so highly artificial as that of the next
century will be. Undoubtedly the growth of
sanitary science and the knowledge of the
larger facts of hygiene, which is only now
beginning to dawn upon us, will have a great

disease, can be disposed of, apparently, whenever the
human race, now mightily smitten with internecine strife,
decides that this campaign against a common foe is worth
while. It takes some seconds to realise — or begin to realise
— what the extinction of tuberculosis will signify in private
and hospital practice. Yet the extermination of the last
tubercle bacillus is an event quite certainly hidden in the
womb of time — time pregnant by science."

THE CULT OF THE WEAK 125

influence in correcting some of the evils which
over-civilisation at present entails. But the
very progress of the art of healing will no doubt
have the effect of perpetuating in a manner
the existence of illness. Every forward step
in medicine serves to save alive some weakling
that in a less advanced civilisation would die ;
and these survivors, possibly propagating their
species, will have weak descendants, on whom
whatever possibility of disease continues to
exist will certainly fasten. The discovery of
means by which we can make a weak " consti-
tution " into a strong one is perhaps the least
likely of medical innovations. It would be
altogether contrary to the general spirit of the
times anticipated to expect that we shall have
steeled our hearts to the destruction of feeble
lives as dangerous to the race. We are much
more likely to go on finding better means to
perpetuate them : and this means that there
will always be work for the doctor, though the
infective fevers will have been banished from
the earth. Medicine, therefore, will still aspire.
But apart from what are called occupation-
diseases, caused by certain manufacturing pro-
cesses (of which the more deadly, as phosphorus
match-making, lead-glazing of earthenware
and the manufacture of enamelled iron will
before long certainly be abolished), the elabor-
ate machinery and rapid travel of the new age
must needs exact a certain toll of death and

126 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

mutilation. The surgeon will have more to
do than the physician. Frightful accidents
will occur from time to time. The maim, the
halt and the blind must pay the price of pro-
gress. And it is hardly possible that nervous
diseases and insanity, incident to the pressure of
civilisation, can be eliminated. But certainly
the alleviations of all but the last, and even of
that except in its extreme expression as total
dementia, will have advanced to a high standard.
We shall no doubt, for instance, have discovered
means of so acting on the sensory system that
we shall be able innocuously and temporarily
to paralyse at any desired spot the nerves which
transmit pain. Thus, during convalescence,
the injured will suffer no discomfort except
that of confinement, and our means of amusing
the patient by talking machines that will read
and sing to him, and the theatroscopes that
will project before him moving and coloured
pictures of life or the play, will make the sick
bed almost a paradise.

As we have seen that, apart from the
sentimental reasons which have been sug-
gested,1 animal and flesh foods must, for
economical reasons, have been abandoned long
before the end of the century, the grazing of
cattle being far too expensive a method of
utilising the soil, we may be quite sure that
the sciences connected with agriculture will
1 Ante, page 34.

THE FOOD OF THE FUTURE 127

receive far greater attention than they now
enjoy. It will grow more important with every
decade to obtain the greatest possible tribute
from the portions of land, steadily decreasing
in area, which can be spared from the growing
needs of the builder. Every discovery of the
chemist which can be laid under contribution
by the agriculturist will eagerly be seized upon.
Every means which can be devised for replac-
ing what we take from the soil will be utilised
to the full : and of course the inevitable dis-
appearance of the horse as a means of traction,
and of the flocks and herds which now yield
manure, and perhaps the gradual exhaustion
of the minerals (as rock phosphates) from
which artificial soil enrichers are prepared, will
make it necessary to rearrange, on safe,
economical and convenient lines, our present
plans of sanitation. The insane wastefulness
of draining into the sea cannot long be
tolerated. Every conceivable means of con-
serving our mundane capital will have to be
made use of. In other ways science will come
to the rescue. The farmer's sufferings from
the depredations of vermin of various kinds
will perhaps never be much affected by inven-
tion, because all nature is so curiously inter-
dependent that the eradication of one pest has
an awkward way of intensifying some greater
evil : we destroy birds and are punished by a
plague of caterpillars. The accidents of

128 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

climate, too, can perhaps only be obviated in a
very small measure, though the science of
meteorology, constantly being helped by
facilities for better observation-reporting, will
unquestionably help the agriculturist by giv-
ing him timely warnings. It seems hardly
possible to doubt that the eccentricities of
climate and the unexpected shifting of the
rainy season in Manchuria during the Russo-
Japanese war must have been caused by the
vast atmospheric disturbances created by days
and weeks of cannonading : and of course it is
an old theory that heavy gun-fire " brings
down the rain." Military historians say that
the number of wet-day battles altogether
exceeds any expectation which could have
been formed without allowing for effects of
this sort. When science has pondered upon
the subject, and instituted in an ordered
manner experiments of a kind hitherto never
taken very seriously, it may very well be that
some means less violent than the detonation of
explosives may be discovered by the practical
meteorologist for creating disturbances in the
atmosphere ; and while it may not be possible
to prevent excessive rainfall at inconvenient
times, it seems easy to conceive that when
there is moisture in the atmosphere we may be
able to bring it down as rain. Of course this
is a very different thing from breaking up
droughts : and artificial rain-making cannot in

iliC*

REGULATION OF CLIMATE 129

itself be anything but a momentary expedient.
The effects of deforestation have for some
time been observed and the plan of improving
waterless areas by the contrary process is
already discussed. While it seems rather a
<c large order " to undertake to meddle with the
balance of atmospheric composition on a large
scale, especially as we know so little of the
conditions that even success might very
possibly be attended by unforeseen and
perhaps calamitous results, there is nothing
intrinsically absurd in the notion that we
might adopt means on a vast scale for increas-
ing oceanic evaporation and, utilising the exact
foreknowledge of winds and air currents which
we shall certainly have achieved, bring moisture
and rain to arid tracts or countries suffering
from drought. The operation would no doubt
require to be stupendous, but the next century
is not going to be afraid of stupendous opera-
tions ; and anticipating vast and unforeseen
progress in meteorology, it would be hazardous
to believe that no practical use will be made of
such progress.

While our knowledge and mastery of the
planet we possess, and of its forces, are being
steadily advanced by scientific discovery, and
the researches of the pure scientist are con-
stantly yielding practical results at first un-
dreamed of, it is impossible to doubt that
man's knowledge of himself will make equal
i

130 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

progress. And it is not alone the physical
constitution of man that will be interrogated.
Everything assists the belief that this century
will be among other things the century of
psychical advance. We appear to be on the
verge of great discoveries concerning the
human mind, and especially concerning the
relation of body to consciousness. Hypnotism
has only during a comparatively short time
been the subject of systematic observation,
even in France ; but at any time during the
last ten years results have been achieved
which, if foreseen a century ago, would
certainly have produced a widespread recru-
descence of belief in witchcraft. What the
developed science of a hundred years hence
will be capable of would certainly be a great
deal more surprising if we could foresee it to-
day. It is reported from the Salpetriere
Hospital that a woman, under hypnosis, has
had the existence of a picture on a blank sheet
of paper suggested to her with such vividness
that, on the suggestion being revived at a
subsequent period, even after a considerable
interval, she was able to detect that the
" picture" was upside down, the blank paper
having been actually reversed. This phe-
nomenon is attributed to a great accentuation
of the sense of vision produced by hypnotism,
it being supposed that the paper, perfectly
blank on ordinary observation, had really some

PSYCHOLOGY, A.D. 2000 131

local irregularity of colour or surface which
the sharpened vision of the subject was able,
unconsciously, to utilise. What secrets in the
mechanism of the senses may not this fore-
shadow ? Without any recourse to hypnotism,
as we at present understand hypnotism, im-
pressions have, in a number of instances suffi-
cient to exclude all possibility of collusion or
error, been conveyed from one mind to another
without the use of any of the ordinary means
of communication : and it is shown in experi-
ments seriously conducted by trained observers
that the faculties of thus communicating and
receiving impressions can be steadily culti-
vated. In other words, it would appear that
human consciousness possesses some sort of
emanation, and although certain " ray " experi-
ments possibly connected with the subject have
not received universal acceptance, it is evident
that the future is going to enlarge considerably
our knowledge of the nature of mental process.
At present we know nothing — and it has been
said with some rashness that we must always
remain in a like ignorance — of the interval
between sense and consciousness. We know
how the ear receives air-vibrations, how it
collects and conducts them to the auditory
nerves, carefully protecting itself, by the action
of beautifully ordered springs and cushions,
from the effects of vibrations violent enough to
be dangerous to its own integrity. But even

CHAPTER VIII

EDUCATIOK A HUHDRED TEARS HENCE

ALLOWING, as every competent thinker must
allow, a foil measure of validity to the con-
tention that social developments are matters
of slow growth and gradual attainment rather
than of sudden and catastrophic change ; ad-
mitting that even in die sphere of scientific
discovery and mechanical invention changes
occur much more gradually than a cursory
glance at individual achievements would
suggest; recognising that many of the most
remarkable changes whose arrival in the past
is the only possible valid guide to anticipation
of similar or kindred changes in the future ; it
is still a condition of such anticipation that we
should take account of causes likely to be
operative in altering the rate at which the
world will move. To allow that social im-
provements generally have the air of occurring
almost automatically is not to conceive that
they are without cause. Neither can it be
believed by anyone who has studied the
history of such movements in the past, or

EDUCATION, A.D. 2000 135

watched them in current progress, that the
rate of development is everywhere and at all
periods the same. There have been eras of
almost complete moral, and even of almost
complete mechanical, stagnation in the history
of the world. There have been other eras of
almost violent reformation and reconstruction.
To reason as if these characteristics were
arbitrarily or miraculously imposed upon the
physiognomy of society, to be content with
laboriously unintelligent estimation of the facts
without attempting to learn anything from
them of their causes, is to neglect the only
important lesson which either history or
observation is capable of teaching. When,
therefore, an enormous acceleration in a
rate of progress already unprecedented in the
records of society has been predicted for the
next hundred years of human history, it is
evident that this anticipation must have
been based upon some estimate of forces
calculated to be operative in producing ac-
celeration.

So far as scientific or material progress is
concerned, it is obvious enough that we shall
move forward with increasing memtmfmm,
because every discovery and every invention
tends automatically to facilitate fresh attain-
ment, and the very growth of population must
act in the same way, as must also the struggle
for existence, As there are every year more

CHAPTER VIII

EDUCATION A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

ALLOWING, as every competent thinker must
allow, a full measure of validity to the con-
tention that social developments are matters
of slow growth and gradual attainment rather
than of sudden and catastrophic change ; ad-
mitting that even in the sphere of scientific
discovery and mechanical invention changes
occur much more gradually than a cursory
glance at individual achievements would
suggest ; recognising that many of the most
remarkable changes whose arrival in the past
is the only possible valid guide to anticipation
of similar or kindred changes in the future ; it
is still a condition of such anticipation that we
should take account of causes likely to be
operative in altering the rate at which the
world will move. To allow that social im-
provements generally have the air of occurring
almost automatically is not to conceive that
they are without cause. Neither can it be
believed by anyone who has studied the
history of such movements in the past, or

EDUCATION, A.D. 2000 135

watched them in current progress, that the
rate of development is everywhere and at all
periods the same. There have been eras of
almost complete moral, and even of almost
complete mechanical, stagnation in the history
of the world. There have been other eras of
almost violent reformation and reconstruction.
To reason as if these characteristics were
arbitrarily or miraculously imposed upon the
physiognomy of society, to be content with
laboriously unintelligent estimation of the facts
without attempting to learn anything from
them of their causes, is to neglect the only
important lesson which either history or
observation is capable of teaching. When,
therefore, an enormous acceleration in a
rate of progress already unprecedented in the
records of society has been predicted for the
next hundred years of human history, it is
evident that this anticipation must have
been based upon some estimate of forces
calculated to be operative in producing ac-
celeration.

So far as scientific or material progress is
concerned, it is obvious enough that we shall
move forward with increasing momentum,
because every discovery and every invention
tends automatically to facilitate fresh attain-
ment, and the very growth of population must
act in the same way, as must also the struggle
for existence. As there are every year more

136 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

men and women working on scientific research
and on mechanical invention, the results must
be progressively greater every year ; and as
the rewards of success are increased by the
growing demand resulting from a growing
population, it is evident that the incentives to
industry in this respect are proportionately
liable to increase. But the ethical progress
of the world is actuated by forces entirely
different, and what makes for mechanical im-
provement may very easily be conceived — in
fact has actually been conceived by one rather
conspicuous prophet — to operate adversely
upon the moral future of the race.

No secret, however, has been made of the
present writer's belief that our descendants a
hundred years hence will have made moral
progress quite as remarkable as the mechanical
progress of which the anticipation is likely to
be contested by no reasonably imaginative
observer. This ethical improvement, gradual,
and momentarily imperceptible as it may be,
necessarily has causes which must now, how-
ever tentatively and however cursorily, be
examined.

That these causes will be powerful, con-
tinuous in action and based upon the funda-
mentals of human character, is evident. That
in their operation they will be opposed by
other influences not less easy to foresee is
equally manifest. What we have to precog-

MORALITY AND MOTIVES 137

nise are the net results likely to be achieved
by the interaction of opposing forces, of which
those tending to improvement are confidently
believed the stronger.

The most powerful of all moral influences
in the future will undoubtedly be the reform of
education, not merely by the improvement of
its methods in various departments, but also,
and with much more importance, in the general
spirit with which its objects will be conceived.
But'in order to affirm that this reform will
occur, we must first demonstrate that the
grounds- upon which it is anticipated are
adequate* We must, in the terms of the
formula above proposed, be satisfied that they
are in harmony with the fundamentals of
human character.

If there be any human motive of which
something approaching universality can be
predicted — quod semper > quod ubique> quod ab
omnibus — it is that of parental solicitude. No
progenitor of children, however little amenable
to high aspirations, is wholly free from the
wish that his offspring shall grow up to be
wiser, stronger, better, more prosperous than
himself.* The innate hopefulness of the race
expressed in the arid comment that, in his
own estimation, "man never is, but always to
be blest," is often discouraged by the time a
man's children are beginning to grow up,
especially in these days of late marriage and

138 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

deferred parenthood. Realising, as most of
us have realised only too acutely by the time
we are forty, that we have more or less failed
in the ambitions which seemed so easy of
future attainment when we were twenty-five,
aspiration begins to cast a golden light upon
the career of our children, and it is to the
successes and the fame of our first-born that
we look for consolation in the failure which,
for ourselves, we no longer hope to evade.
Romance, celebrity, even perhaps worldly
reward, we can no longer expect for ourselves ;
but these dear hands that a little time ago we
held while the first tottering steps of babyhood
were being tried, shall return to us hereafter
with the laurel in them that we have never
plucked. Perhaps we shall not live to see it
on our child's brow, but what of that? Our
confident prevision of this glory is what we
console ourselves withal : this, though we
hardly know it, is our True Romance : —

" The comfortress of unsuccess,
To bid the dead good-night."

Neither in the material and the intellectual
spheres alone do we aspire more^nobly for our
children than for ourselves. Not success and
not fame limit our demand of Fate, that she
repair in our children the injustice of which we
ourselves cease to complain. We want them
to be better men and women than we have

PRACTICAL EXPECTATIONS 139

been. To put the thing on its lowest ground
(and nothing but the lowest motives ever
seem to be accorded the smallest validity by
the more conspicuous among recent vaticinators
of human action) it behoves us to make the
best we can of our children's morals, if we are
presently in old age likely to be dependant
upon them. But for those who, like Malvolio,
" think nobly of the soul," it is sufficient to
rely upon the manifested predilection of every
parent in order to be convinced that the
education of the future will be moralised as
well as rationalised through the natural
emotions of man. Only the dullest and most
turgid imagination will consent to believe that
the horrible conditions of competitive struggle
will be permitted to foster only the lower
faculties, as greed, selfishness, unscrupulous
cunning and subtle evasiveness, at the expense
of all the finer characteristics of man. There
is no cynic so base as would deliberately seek
the fortune of his sons in the inculcation of
chicane. Struggle must sharpen all our intel-
lects as life grows yearly more difficult, but one
by-product of this attrition will be the increased
morality with which the education of each gen-
eration successively arising will be conceived.

Pausing for a moment to remark, in regard
to the methods in detail by which the improve-
ment of education will most likely be sought,
that to foresee what is probable is not neces-

140 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

sarily to endorse it as ideal, and that the object
of this book is not to formulate Utopia, but to
predict the consequences implied by existing
forces after the latter have been during a stated
time in operation; and admitting that no reform
ever practised within the recorded history of
man has been without drawbacks inherent in
its own constitution, it may be said at once
that the work of instruction is capable of
mechanical and instrumental improvement not
less considerable than any other labour to be
undertaken by ourselves and our successors.
Even within a lifetime's limits all sorts of appli-
ances for assisting the mind of the learner to
apprehend the facts sought to be learnt have
been invented, and our children, as we all know,
are much more easily taught than we were our-
selves. The laudator temporis acti is always
pretty ready to depreciate the value of these
improvements, and perhaps it is natural enough
in most of us to find it difficult to believe that
any plan of teaching can be better for our
children than the one which produced results
so pleasingly exemplified by ourselves. But
at all events, it will be generally, if a little
grudgingly, admitted that any form of apparatus
capable of saving time and trouble in teaching
is capable of being ranked as an improvement.
Unquestionably appliances having this object
will be constantly invented and used during the
present century. For instance, it is hardly

TEACHING-MACHINES 141

conceivable that something less than perfection
in the teaching of a foreign pronunciation by
the mouth of the best teacher who can be hired
for the work will content us, when perfected
talking-machines presently enable us to give
examples of the still better speech. Evidently
a boy would learn to speak French with a
purer accent by listening to a phonograph
which, freed of the present tin-trumpet timbre
and whirring, repeated the speech of the Comtdie
Franfaise, than by hearing an ordinary master
read aloud. To say this is not to suggest that
professors of languages will be dispensed with ;
but their teaching can be thus supplemented.
Similarly the use of magic-lanterns and kineto-
scopic pictures is capable of improving greatly
upon the blackboard and chalk still used. But
the plan of education in itself is so greatly more
important to be foreseen than the mechanism
by which the details can be worked out, and the
latter can with so very little difficulty be
imagined by anyone interested in them, that the
reader shall not be troubled with any discussion
of this branch of the subject, but will rather be
asked to concentrate his attention upon the
moral and intellectual aspects of it.

Conceiving, what I have all along en-
deavoured to show is reasonable to conceive,
that all social institutions will be governed with
ever-increasing intelligence and rationality as
time goes on, and that they could not possibly

142 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

be tolerated otherwise, it is easy to see that
education as hitherto and at present practised
would never do for our grandchildren, let alone
for our more advanced descendants a hundred
years hence. To begin with, parents in that
era would certainly consider it hopelessly and
criminally unethical, if not actively immoral.
Projects of reform, especially in morals, are
often dismissed as visionary, because it is
pointed out that no changes can take place in
the social order which do not appeal directly to
the self-interest of the individual. In other
words, there is no mainspring of social action
except aggregated selfishness. Without delay-
ing to examine the validity of the belief, it maybe
said at once that its full acceptance is no obstacle
to the admission of the whole case on which is
founded the belief that education will be con-
ducted chiefly with a view to its moral effect at
the period I am attempting to describe. The
very circumstances on which writers rely, who
predict the ethical deterioration of man, are those
which make the ethical reform of education in-
evitable. Precisely in proportion as co mpetition
tends to harden and debase, there will arise the
unavoidable necessity for deliberate counter-
action of this tendency, resulting, as the effect of
the measures necessitated becomes felt, in the
changes of commercial and political conditions
already1 predicted. If we consider at all
1 Ante, Chapter III.

AMENITIES OF EDUCATION 143

thoughtfully the necessities of a hundred years
hence, it is not difficult to foresee the general
lines upon which they are likely to be met —
lines not necessary to be accepted as represent-
ing a perfect or ideal state, but broadly indicat-
ing the methods which the effect of visible
tendencies will by that time demand of a
practical people.

Here, as everywhere else, the only safe
guidance as to the practice of the future must
be sought in the tendencies of the present.
The tendency most forcibly in evidence during
recent times is that in favour of softening the
former acerbities of education. Whereas the
schoolhouse of half a century ago was something
like a penitentiary in the way it was conducted,
the schoolhouse of to-day is managed as much
like a place of recreation as it possibly can be.
At all events, recreation is at least as assiduously
cultivated as study, and the candidate for an
under-mastership who has a good cricket record
will find employment a good deal more easily
than one with a double-first. If there be any
complaint of public and other upper-class
schools at the present time — and there is room
for plenty of complaint — it is more often that
games are too much insisted upon than that
brains are overtaxed. There is a visible re-
action in regard to this ; but it is not to be
regarded as a reaction in favour of the old
draconic methods. On the contrary, " the grow-

144 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

ing sentimentality of the age " steadily de-
mands amenity of treatment for the fortunate
^offspring of the twentieth century. The late
James Payn, sanest and kindliest of men, was
never tired of denouncing what he called the
barbarous and indecent corporal punishments
of Eton. He used to say that if a picture of
an Eton boy being birched were published in
the Illustrated London News no boy would ever
be birched again, and I believe that he tried to
get either Mr Latey or Mr Shorter to insert
such a picture. Be this as it may, what he said
was perfectly true. I shall have something to
say presently on this same question of school
discipline : meantime it may with perfect safety
be predicted of the master's cane a hundred
years hence that it will be found only in
museums, and (whether rightly or wrongly) be
regarded as a relic of degrading barbarism.
One reason why corporal punishment will have
to be abolished is that boys and girls will cer-
tainly be educated together instead of apart.
As we could hardly cane girls (and it would be
of very little use if we could) we shall assuredly
have to get on without caning their masculine
schoolmates.

I suppose that few will contest the statement
that the religious teaching practised in schools
at the present time not only has very little to
do with the question of morality but tends
distinctly, except in Roman Catholic seminaries

EDUCATED MORALITY 145

and some few non-conforming colleges where a
special kind of education is given, to have less
and less connection therewith. Whatever
moral effect " schooling" has upon the
adolescent is recognisably and recognisedly due
to the " tone " of the school itself, that is, to
public opinion among the taught, and only in-
directly to anything which emanates from the
teachers. Assuredly a proficient knowledge of
Biblical history has no ethical effect greater
than a proficient knowledge of Greek mythology
(at least of so much of it as is properly selected
for school use), and we have it on the authority
of Mr E. H. Cooper, a very entertaining if not
particularly sound writer on children, that even
" Confirmation " classes are by no means uni-
form in promoting a religious sentiment in
boys.1

The moral advantages of education, there-
fore, tend to be found in the effect of public
opinion and the general "tone" of a school.
It is discovered in practice that direct moral
inculcation is not very successful. It is to be
assumed that the ingenuity of future paeda-
gogues will be devoted to the discovery of the
best ways in which indirect moral influence can
be cultivated. In view of the high importance
which will evidently be attached to such in-
fluence, we may take it for granted that it is
not in connection with any single branch of

1 The Twentieth Century Child. Chapter III.
K

146 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

tuition that it will be sought for, but that it will
be root and branch of the whole scheme of
educational work. One very powerful assist-
ance will be rendered to this by the system of
co-education.

It is quite certain that boys and girls will
always be educated together a hundred years
hence. The tendency of the sexes to become
less different intellectually is a known fact of
sociology.1 It carries with it an inevitable
tendency to dispense with the separation of the
sexes in education. Wherever co-education
has been tried its effects have been excellent.
The presence of female students in medical
colleges has had a markedly reformative in-
fluence on the manners and moral tone of
medical student life, not long ago the opprobrium
of civilisation. The advantages to a parent of
being able to send his sons and his daughters
to one place of instruction, and to the children
themselves of the companionship and mainten-
ance of family relations thus afforded, are
equally obvious. In one other respect, which
can only be touched upon lightly here, the
system of joint education must be enormously
beneficial, at all events to boys, and greatly
beneficial to their sisters. Every competent
schoolmaster is acquainted with special
difficulties liable to arise about the age of
puberty. The monastic seclusion of the school-

1 Spencer : Study of Sociology. Chapter XV.

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 147

boy (like that of the single men in barracks
who, according to Mr Kipling, " don't grow
into plaster saints " ), and the glamorous mystery
surrounding the opposite sex, tend to accentuate
these difficulties. The habit of constant
association with girls who are not his sisters
relieves a boy of the exaggerated sense of
sexual isolation. A boy always brought up
with girls is not liable to be constantly thinking
about girlhood : and in practical experience
many people are aware that boys who have had
the opportunity of frequent association with the
girl friends of their sisters grow into purer-
minded and more chivalrous men, than those
who have lacked this advantage ; and the
thoughtful future will assuredly cultivate the
system which affords it. It is quite evident, in
addition, that the fatuous and unreasonable
mystery with which for centuries the natural
facts most liable to be important in adult life
have been made inevitable subjects of unholy
curiosity, will be swept away, to the great en-
hancement of sane and clean thought in girls
as well as in boys, in young women even more
than in young men : while the tragedies which
knowledge can avert, hidden horrors of our
own day that we are too sentimental to envisage,
but that everyone must now and then have
met with a hint of, will happily exist no more,
or occur but rarely.

Among the indirect considerations which

148 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

will assist us to the conclusion that co-education
is the best, will be the endeavour, everywhere
apparent, to make the work of teaching agree-
able to the taught. This is the keynote of the
tendencies whose fruition we may look for at
the end of this century. It will have been re-
cognised that to conceive of education as a
process of forcing knowledge into unwilling
memories is to place the greatest possible
obstacle in the way of success. Even the child
whose natural faculties are joyously receptive
is bound to resist more or less unconsciously
teaching that is conducted on the assumption
that he won't learn if he can possibly help it.
The worst child in the class sets the tone of the
rest. The boy who can most successfully
evade real learning, and trick his instructors
well enough to escape punishment, is the hero
of the place. Nothing could be much worse
for morality. Public opinion in schools, useful
as it is in other respects, is everywhere harmful
in this particular. The paedagogue of the
future will proceed on a method far more
rational.

In its essence it is quite easy to see what
method the tendency of thought is likely to
develop. Here, as in so many other places,
etymology can help us. If we could think,
whenever we talk or make plans concerning
the subject, of what education really means —
a drawing-out of the natural faculties of the

GAMES F, LESSONS 149

instructed — we should always conceive more
rationally of the work. There is no animal
whose greatest pleasures are derived from
anything else than the exercise of its faculties.
Our dog, whether he jumps and tears about in
glee as we take him for a walk, or sits happily
by our side, his head on our knees, his wistful
eyes scrutinising our face, sympathetic with
every emotion, illustrates this fact. In the
one case he is exercising the natural faculties
of speed and vigorous agility ; in the latter, the
acquired and inherited faculties of mental
comprehension. Shut him up in a room alone,
or with an unfriendly person, and he is miser-
able or goes to sleep, providently accumulating
energy for the next opportunity of exercise.
What I am not afraid to call his mental
pleasures are not less keen, if I know anything
at all of dogs (who have loved many of them)
than his physical pleasures ; and I never had
a dog in my life who would not cheerfully
neglect his food to come indoors and sit with
me in my library. Are children's brains less
energetic, less capable of yielding pleasure to
their small proprietors than the brains of a
dog ? One of the mistakes that we are already
beginning to find out (and consequently one
of those which we may expect to have amended
long before this time next century) is the tacit
assumption that games are richer in pleasure
than study. It isn't the boys and girls them-

150 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

selves that give this tincture to school-govern-
ment. Plenty of them really prefer books
before balls, until they go to school ; where
we at once proceed to show them that we
regard cricket as a sort of alleviation of their
hard lot, and with football console them for
their French lessons, and redress arithmetic
by " rounders/' There is no reason why
this should lead to any neglect of athletics.
Only, athletics will be properly treated
as only one of the joys of a school life that
will be fulfilled of other pleasures equally ab-
sorbing.

The method which will make education
agreeable instead of repulsive is part and
parcel of the system on which education will
be conducted, and it is only incidentally that
it will subserve the concurrent sentimental
tenderness which finds expression to-day in
unwise use of games in themselves highly
beneficial, just as elsewhere it finds expression
by cultivating gluttony.1

1 Having properly decided that it is well for children to
be fed plainly while at school, parents take the greatest
pleasure in alleviating this plainness by " tuck baskets "
during term, and the most wicked and immoral palate-
tickling during holidays. Indeed an excessive appetite
seems to be regarded even by quite sensible people as
rather an ornament to the juvenile character. Mr Cooper,
whose charming book, The Twentieth Century Child> has
already been referred to, describes with what I am afraid
is approval the incident of a boy whom he brought away

MEMORY-TRAINING 151

The true object of instruction being to
show children how to think, the intellectual
exercise of thinking will be always found,
as it has already long ago been found where
this highly unusual method has been ex-
perimented with, to give keen pleasure to the
instructed.1

A great deal that has been said both in regard
to the excessive and in part exclusive training
of memory, and in regard to the propriety of
reversing the general order of tuition by pro-
ceeding from concrete facts to generalised
theories instead of beginning with generalisa-
tions and illustrating these by specific instances,
is, for practical reasons, hardly likely to be
acted upon by our descendants. To begin
with, the culture of memory is not in itself an
abuse ; on the contrary, it is a highly necessary
feature of education. What is an abuse is the

from school for a pleasure-trip just after lunch, and who
cheerfully devoured a second lunch in the company of his
friend. Assuredly our descendants will make no such
mistakes as this.

1 Tyndall "On the Importance of the Study of Physics
as a Branch of Education," a lecture at the Royal
Institution : quoted by Herbert Spencer in his Education^
Intellectual, Moral and Physical, a work which, though
not very practical, contains a mass of very suggestive
matter on a subject which no one else, so far as I am
aware, has approached in quite the same spirit. As this
book has been reprinted at so low a price as sixpence,
there is no excuse for any parent who is unacquainted with
its absolutely invaluable teachings.

152 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

substitution of remembrance for ratiocination.
Teachers in the future will be more anxious to
develop the mind from within than to graft
information upon it from without. But they
certainly will foster the faculty called memory
— or to speak more exactly, they will refrain
from destroying that faculty in the way that
present-day education destroys it. For as a
matter of fact, the memory of a young child
who has never been taught anything is in-
variably good, being both copious and retentive.
One often hears it said that children quickly
forget ; but it is also the case that they very
quickly remember again. An Anglo-Indian
friend told me a somewhat pleasing anecdote
which (though of course it does not prove)
illustrates a general fact of which anyone can
find proofs for himself by a little observation.
Having taken home for a year's leave his
children, reared, like all other English children
in India, amid native servants, and speaking
quite correct Urdu instead of the barbarous
dog-Hindustani which suffices for their elders,
he was under the impression, when the
"wicked day of destiny " arrived, and the
family had to return from refreshment in
England to labour in India, that they had
completely forgotten the soft vernacular speech
which formerly came much more easily from
them than English. And his belief was con-
firmed when, the children having been promptly

THE KEYNOTE OF TUITION 153

carried off by the adoring servants, an aged
bearer came to him almost in tears, complaining
that " Baba Sahib" could not understand him.
But the next day all the little people were
chattering Urdu as easily as ever. The fact
is that a child's mind concentrates itself
intensely upon whatever subject interests at a
given moment, and neglects everything else.
By our present method of education we do all
that the most malignant ingenuity could devise
to destroy both this invaluable gift of mental
concentration and the accompanying faculty of
memory. The new teaching will industriously
cultivate both. There is no doubt that the
premature and unskilful use of books as im-
plements of instruction is extremely bad for
the memory ; and the employment of distaste-
ful and inconsiderate methods of teaching
is equally destructive of concentration. A
hundred years hence, when it has been
recognised that the easiest way to teach
anything is to find out how a child can be made
to want to learn about it, there will be no
difficulty in securing attention. Children's
minds do not, as most people suppose, tire
very easily. On the contrary, they are with
great difficulty fatigued. Anyone who has
been so imprudent as to embark on a course
of tale-telling near bedtime or near a meal
hour, knows that the little people are almost
incapable of being satiated. And the de-

154 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

scendants of these little people will be just
as insatiable of being taught, because we shall
have found out how to make them want to be
taught.

Herein is the whole keynote of the education
of the future, moral as well as intellectual.
We shall no longer treat good behaviour as if
it were an artificial and unnatural abstinence
from the true desires of the child or of man.
We shall arrange that people, young and old,
may wish to act rightly. The point of reform
will be shifted. At present, all kinds of morality
are approached on the assumption that it is
requisite to persuade to an unwilling abstinence
from vice, and that when the desires of the
wicked have been curbed into a sort of ascetic
abstemiousness prompted by fear of punish-
ment, whether overt or implicit, a moral feat
has been performed. The new morality will
only be content when the subject of it would
not sin if you asked him to. His moral sense
will have been stoically cultivated. Obedience
and the law of Thou-shalt-not will be dethroned.
This law represents in the education of to-
day the highest form of youthful virtue. Yet
mere obedience, even where it has always
been considered most valuable, namely, where it
takes the shape of military discipline, has proved
an utter failure ; the last two great wars proved
the fact. If the lamentable doggerel which en-
shrines the applauded self-immolation of Casa-

THE ART OF THINKING 155

bianca have not fortunately been forgotten
altogether a hundred years hence, it will
assuredly be quoted only as a monumental
example of old-fashioned fat-headedness, even
more offensive to the sense of reason than the
verses themselves are to the sense of poetical
taste. The Casabiancas of the next century
will have been allowed — I do not say taught,
because children don't need to be taught this
— to think for themselves. And no great
exertion will have been required. On the
contrary, it is impossible to listen for many
hours to what goes on in a modern school
without being impressed with the ingenious
arrangements that are required in order to
prevent boys and girls from thinking for them-
selves. The notion of their doing so seems as
offensive to the present race of schoolmasters
as, to Mr W. S. Gilbert's sentinel, —

. . . " the prospect of a lot
Of dull M.P.s in close proximity
All thinking for themselves."

However, the purpose of this dissertation is
not so much to point out the errors of the
present as to indicate the improvements of the
future : and we may be sure that the prime
virtues of the scholar a hundred years hence
will be reasonableness and ingenuity, not dull
obedience. Thus right conduct will be in-
culcated, not as an expression of obedience

156 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

but as the only reasonable way of behaving,
and the incentive to right action will be that it
is also sensible action. The test of all conduct
will be its results. Whatever does harm to
self and others will be obviously wrong ; what
does good or is indifferent will be right. The
standard of these things that has to be accepted
all through life will be set up from the first, an
enormous improvement upon the vicious
system of exacting irrational obedience for the
first eighteen or twenty-one years of life, and
expecting this to produce reasonable self-
government thereafter, which is so fruitful in
the wild-oats of early adulthood. The latter
could hardly be more ingeniously cultivated.

It would be extremely rash to conclude that
books will not be employed as implements of
instruction : but it is quite certain that they
will not be employed as they now are, chiefly
for the purpose of saving a schoolmaster the
trouble of making his pupils think for them-
selves : and incidentally the abolition of this
mistake will react most usefully upon memory,
itself, with the exception of reasoning power,
the most valuable of mental faculties. Oral
teaching, accompanied in every possible place by
practical illustration, will store and build up
memory (as it always does when we employ it
now) far more rapidly than anything else. The
delight which this method of teaching confers
upon the taught is enhanced by the avidity

BOREDOM ABOLISHED 157

with which such subjects as chemistry, practical
mechanics, and even geometry when taught
with apparatus instead of with figures, are
received by children of every growth.

To imagine that children can ever invariably
be controlled without some sort of punishments
would, no doubt, be thought ridiculous Utopi-
anism. But the greatest part of the necessity
for correction will have disappeared automati-
cally when the greatest source of youthful
misbehaviour — restless superfluous activity —
has been deviated into channels which will
utilise it. Children whisper, fidget, or make a
noise in class, simply because they are bored
by the dulness of mechanical processes which
we persistently use in seeking to cram informa-
tion into their minds from without instead of
exercising the reason that dwells within. As
the education of future generations will as-
suredly have to be a great deal more copious
than what we are content with now, it is
fortunate that this reform will also be a great
economiser of time. Every schoolmaster
knows that an interested class progresses far
more rapidly than one that is bored and conse-
quently inattentive ; and the same boy who is
alive to the subtlest implications of the highly
complex law of cricket, will often be found
utterly incapable of applying the very simple
definitions at the beginning of Eucli d I., for the
simple reason that cricket intere sts him, while

158 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

Euclid doesn't. This is not because the
latter is " harder" than cricket, nor yet because
cricket is an outdoor pleasure, while Euclid is
(or rather should be) an indoor one. It is
because in cricket we get him into the habit of
reasoning for himself, while in geometry we
only too frequently fail to do what Euclid is
supposed to help us to do.

Nevertheless, after making every allowance
for reduced temptations to misbehaviour re-
sulting from the absorption of redundant
mental activity, it is still to be feared that
disciplinary punishment will sometimes be
required. This will certainly not be corporal.
The uncivilised and degrading expedient of
purposely-inflicted pain is visibly on its last
legs. There are still reactionary people who
write to the papers in order to explain that
the use of scholastic torture makes for manli-
ness ; they must be presumed to think that it
would be on the whole rather good for boys to
be birched at intervals, like Charles Lamb, not
as a punishment, but to keep them humble.
But the next century will have outgrown such
ideas. The commonest of present-day alter-
natives— " lines " — is equally obsolescent, the
evil effect of this upon handwriting and health
being already recognised. " Keeping-in " is
probably the most injurious of all forms of
correction, but it is only too consistent with
our present plans of education to treat extra

SCHOOL PUNISHMENTS 159

tuition as a punishment — the best possible way
to make all teaching hated. It is much more
likely that the schoolmaster of a hundred years
hence will punish refractory and inattentive
pupils by keeping-out instead of keeping-in.
The most detested of all chastisements will be
exclusion from the pleasant exercise of learning.
During the Russo-Japanese War newspaper
readers noted with saturnine amusement that
the artillery regiment which in St Petersburg
had the maladroitness to fire a salute with a
shotted gun and very nearly kill the Czar
thereby, was punished by being sent to the
front ; while at the beginning of hostilities the
exemplary conduct of the enormous Japanese
army crowded in Tokio for transport was
accounted for by the threat that any soldier
who misbehaved himself would be left at home.
It is the Japanese and not the Russian ideal of
discipline that will animate the schools of the
future. We shall no doubt emulate the reserve
of the Confessor in the Bab Ballads ; old heads
upon young shoulders we shall not expect to
find; and we shall punish when punish we
must. Future advantage, even for oneself,
is seldom a very powerful motive with the
young of any age. But present deprivation is
a chastisement easily and keenly compre-
hended : and the loss of intellectual status
involved in exclusion from a lesson will no
doubt supplement the immediate boredom very

160 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

distasteful to an agile mind, which is the more
immediate effect. I imagine that the naughty
child of the future will be punished by being
shut up in a well-ventilated and well-lighted
but perfectly empty room, with pockets equally
empty. At the same time, by treating de-
privation of it as an evident chastisement, the
desirable nature of instruction will be in a very
useful manner impressed upon the infant mind.
Young persons much more easily believe what
they find to be treated as a matter of course
than what is laboriously impressed upon them
by explicit inculcation. Thus the effect of
rationalised education will not be, as one critic
has rather rashly supposed, to make children
little prigs. On the contrary, its effect will be
to make them naturally and happily interested
little learners — a very different thing. One
of the very greatest improvements in the
rationalised education will precisely be that it
cannot possibly foster the awful priggislmess
which is a very common result of our own
methods.

It has been said already that the education
of the happy future will have to be much more
copious than anything that is at all common
nowadays. The nature of its extensions will
next be discussed.

One of the most important and most moral
objects of education is to impress upon the
mind, as a principle not to be evaded by any

SCIENCE OR CLASSICS ? 161

contrivance whatever, the fact that fixed causes
(among which are personal acts of any kind) pro-
duce fixed effects — that there is no circumstance
which, with sufficient knowledge, could not be
traced back to pre-existing causative circum-
stance. No department of knowledge tends
so intimately to give to the mind the impress
of this fact in the course of its acquisition as
physical science. And as a proficient acquaint-
ance with physical science will be necessary to a
great many occupations, when work of all kinds
is performed in the intelligent manner in which
we have seen reason to be convinced that it
will be performed a hundred years hence, there
will be a greater practical need for scientific
instruction than there is now, though science is
disgracefully neglected even with regard to our
present necessities. As education is to be
given with the object of fitting children for life
as well as developing their minds, the science
of health will certainly be taught ; but all
physical sciences will have their place on the
curriculum even at the early stages, because it
will have been recognised that the habit of
mind which is formed by studies of this kind is
not only very necessary to an efficient working
life, but also very helpful as a basis of practical
culture. It may be conceived that a thorough
"grounding" in physical science will be
thought as much an essential of all education in
the future as a really good training in Latin

162 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

and Greek used to be considered in the past,
and as many of us would like it to be con-
sidered now. Fifty years ago we believed
that no true education could be given in pre-
paration for ordinary life without as much
Latin as was necessary in order to be able to
write a fair copy of elegiacs, and as much
Greek as was necessary in order to read
Homer with comfort. A hundred years hence
we shall think it necessary to be able to read a
scientific thesis comprehendingly.

At a later period of school life, but still early
in it, specialised instruction will no doubt be
begun; and subjects connected with the evident
tendency of a boy's or a girl's mind, and with
the opportunities likely to be presented to either
in forming a career, will be developed to the
exclusion of subjects less immediately sub-
servient to the object of making a useful citizen
of him or her in some particular profession or
branch of industry. Practical demonstrations
of science, instead of being reserved for the
more advanced stages of tuition, will, on the
contrary, form the groundwork ; and children
will be required to work practically themselves
instead of merely sitting still to watch the per-
formances (in this case apt to be regarded with
little more respect than scholastic conjuring
tricks) of a teacher. They will be invited to
deduce laws for themselves from what occurs
in practice, and where they deduce wrong ones

MATHEMATICS 163

they will not be arbitrarily corrected, but
assisted to make further experiments which will
show where the mistake occurs, until at last the
correct generalisation is reached. Only after a
considerable course of practical work will they
be entrusted with books in which great
generalisations are to be found ready made,
and these books will always be regarded as a
sort of pis aller — a time-saving contrivance to
be employed as a regrettable alternative,
because it would take too long to work every-
thing out by the golden implement of individual
observation. The habit of mind thus cultivated,
and the manual dexterity thus obtained, will be
of priceless practical worth in after-life; and
with what rapturous enjoyment will our de-
scendants acquire knowledge which at present
we force upon our children with stripes !

Along with the physical sciences mathematics
will have to be greatly cultivated. But mathe-
matics, when perceived to be ancillary to the
more immediately delightful work of concrete
and experimental science, will lose much terror.
Many mathematical operations can moreover
be demonstrated experimentally, and no oppor-
tunity of thus demonstrating them will be lost.
Rightly treated, mathematics need never be dull.
According to my own experience and all that I
have been able to gather from the recollections
of others, algebra (for instance) is never
abhorred when a proper care is taken to make

164 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

use of its call upon the reasoning faculties ; and
the art of evoking this use will have been care-
fully developed by the educational specialists
who alone will be permitted to direct so delicate
and important a task as the training of the
young. For school teachers will not be merely
more or less erudite people employed to dis-
pense their learning : they will be men and
women who have undergone long and careful
instruction in the art of paedagogy studied as a
specialised faculty in itself.

After mathematics, no doubt languages
occupy chief place in the righteous abhorrence
of present-day school-children. I say righteous
abhorrence with intention, because this depart-
ment of useful learning always has the air of
being purposely planned in order to secure the
maximum of execration accompanied by the
minimum of advantage. What languages will
be taught a hundred years hence> and in what
manner will they be instilled into the children
of our great - great - grand - children ? Any
opinions upon a controversy so recent as that
which a few months ago raged about the
question of compulsory Greek must be more or
less untrustworthy. Every man will take the
view of the future of the dead languages (so
called, as someone1 sanguinely remarked, be-
cause they can never die) determined by his
own view as to whether proficiency in the

1 1 think Mr Andrew Lang.

A "UNIVERSAL" WRITING 165

tongues of Hellas and of Rome ought to be
maintained in his own day. But for a reason
probably admitting of very little controversy, it
is at all events permissible to believe that the
classical languages will at least not have to
meet the urgent competition of a variety of
current languages as subjects of useful learning.
This reason is to be found in the evident
tendency of a paramount tongue to extrude
other tongues from practical employment in
commerce ; and commerce, more than anything
else, will of course always determine the
question of modern language study. Provided
that the race which becomes paramount in the
markets of the world during the course of this
century possesses a reasonably philosophical,
copious, precise language, and one fairly easy
to acquire, it is likely that for commercial
purposes it will become (to use an incorrect, but
not conveniently replaceable term) universal.
To the facile remark that every nation considers
its own speech easy enough for foreigners to
acquire, and much more satisfactory in the
other respects named than any tongue which it
is invited to give itself the trouble of learning,
may be opposed the reply that peoples do in
fact recognise, where it exists, the unsatisfactory
nature of their own speech. For example,
nearly every Russian whom one meets in polite
or commercial circles speaks at least French,
and often speaks it admirably ; while in Norway,

166 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

though the Scandinavian languages are none
of them anything like so difficult to learn as
Russian, practically everyone speaks English.
The case of Japan is even more illustrative ;
for apart from the fact that enough of some
European language to enable one to travel with
perfect comfort is always to be found current
in the Mikado's empire, it is the case that even
for domestic use the Japanese have a popular
language, printed in newspapers and in some
books alongside of the more literary Chinese
idaeographs, and frequently used to elucidate
the latter.1

Thus it is quite easy to believe that the
paramount language of commerce will impose
itself upon at least the business population of
the whole world. As the substitution of
modern languages for the dead languages is
advocated solely on utilitarian grounds, which

1 Should we ever have a " universal " language, is it alto-
gether chimerical to imagine that it might be an ideographic
one? Provided that some simple code of ideographic
writing were invented to denote the very limited number
of concrete notions essential to commercial correspondence,
no one who has had occasion to study Chinese, even in the
most cursory manner, would think it at all a severe effort
of the imagination to conceive of an ideographic notation
as being used for business correspondence. In Chinese,
the unit of expression is an idea. Words which relate to
kindred subjects include, in their ideographs, the sign for
the connecting link. Thus the ideograph for " agriculture "
is made up of the sign for " strength " and for " a field."
Consequently, although the Japanese language when

THE CLASSICS, A.D. 2000 167

practically means that it is advocated because
to know a couple or more foreign languages is
useful in trade; and as no one has ever seriously
pretended that French, German or any other
modern language can compare with Greek and
Latin as intellectual gymnastics and as training
in the precise expression of one's thoughts ; it
may be assumed that, on the ground of com-
petitive usefulness, the latter will not need to
be dispensed with. Whether the study of them
will be abandoned on the ground that the time
they require can be better employed in some
study other than that of languages is another
and more difficult question, the resolution of
which depends upon the view we take of the
literary tendencies probably existing after
another century. If we believe that our de-
scendants will have effected so many improve-
ments in the shape of labour-saving contriv-
ances as to afford a large increase of leisure for

spoken sounds so entirely unlike Chinese that a person
knowing neither can distinguish one from the other when
heard across the width of a street, the Japanese can read
Chinese books without difficulty, and one form of printing
can be read by the Chinese of the North and those of the
South, although the spoken dialects differ so much that
" pidgin " English is often used by the two as a means of
spoken communication. An idseographic medium of com-
mercial writing (not of course so archaic nor so cumbersome
as Chinese, but philosophically devised for the purpose)
would release the student from all difficulties of speech and
accent ; he would always name the signs to himself in his
own language.

168 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

everyone, as compared with what the present
time enjoys, we shall probably expect the
languages which enshrine the greatest literature
of the world to remain a subject of study. If
we believe in the growing intellectuality of man,
we shall be strengthened in the same expecta-
tion. If, on the other hand, we think that the
progress of our race will exhibit itself in the
shape of greedy utilitarianism and of idiotic and
self-destructive immorality, we shall naturally
conclude that no one will be fool enough to
trouble himself with Homer or the Oresteian
trilogy, the laments of Sappho or the philosophy
of Plato. Seeing what great men have taken
this somewhat despondent view of the future,
it would perhaps be immodest to express any
other opinion on the subject.

In any event, we may safely believe that
whatever languages are taught will not be
handled in the manner now current. Mr
Andrew Lang has, in more than one place,
described his own " floundering" into Homer
— a plunge certainly attended with the happiest
results. A method of teaching alien languages
which founds itself upon an imitation of the
natural picking-up of the mother tongue by
babies has been suggested, perhaps without
sufficient consideration of the vast expenditure
of time necessary to the process, and certainly
without sufficient allowance for the fact that it
would be impossible to afford the same inces-

THE CLASSICS, A.D. 2000 169

sant practice which enables children to learn
the language of their fathers and mothers so
easily. But there is no reason why we should
perpetuate the discouraging preponderance of
grammatical and etymological study which
caused the late H. D. Traill to say of certain
professors that

" They heard with a smile of the flowers of style
For they recognised nothing but roots !"

In fact, here as elsewhere, the persistent
demand that schooling be made agreeable will
have the best possible effect in facilitating in-
struction. 1 1 is as literature that all languages —
including the native language of the scholars —
will be taught ; and they will be taught far more
easily than we have any example to assist us in
imagining. Where a foreign language pro-
nounced with a different accent and intonation
from that of the learner is studied, no doubt
(as already mentioned) talking machines will
be employed : and in addition, pupils will be
required to read and speak the language aloud
on all possible occasions, in order to exercise
the organs of speech in the alien manner.1

1 A method, it may be added, which can very usefully
be practised now. Those of us who "rub-up "our French
or German a little before a summer holiday by reading a
novel or two, would always find the results of this rubbing-
up process to be greatly more effective, when presently
utilised abroad, if we would read always aloud instead of in
silence according to the usual procedure.

170 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

It is a trite saying, and one that need not be
dwelt upon here, that history ought not to be
taught as if its sole purpose were to store the
memory with the deeds and misdeeds of kings
and the progress of various wars. It will
certainly be studied hereafter as a vast lesson
in sociology and politics, as an illustration of
the science of human dynamics. It is perhaps
not superfluous to remark that brilliant examples
of the new historiography have shown that
the difference is not, in its result, so great as
some critics imagine. But the deductions from
the facts of history are the important matter :
and the way in which history will be used a
hundred years hence will be in instructing the
future governors of the world how to use their
citizenship wisely. Among other things ex-
pected of the schoolmaster of the future will
be that he implant in his scholars an ardent
desire to do their part in determining the polity
of the state they live in, and the sacred duty of
the ballot will certainly be taught with relation
to whatever methods of utilising the popular
vote may by that time have become current.

Moreover, history, like languages, is capable
of being taught as literature; and the protest
against the prevalent notion that high civilisa-
tion involves the decadence of beauty in any
form implies belief in all the arts as subjects of
cultivation in the schools of the future. It need
not be supposed that the unreasonable waste

LITERATURE-STUDIES 171

of time entailed by the present method of
teaching such a subject as drawing, and our
curious neglect of sculpture and modelling,
will be perpetuated. As we can already see
the dawn of new ideas on both these subjects
the tendency of the future in regard to them is
not difficult to conceive, nor need space be con-
sumed in discussing them in detail. Literature
and poetry (the latter, I need hardly say, no
longer made merely hateful as the subject of
the fatuous torture called " learning by heart ")
with belles-lettres, drawing, painting, and sculp-
ture, will no doubt be taught in an elementary
way to all children, and the study of them
developed further where a natural appetite
demands it. In reply to the very natural
question, "How can an art be taught?" it is
only needful to say that minds exercised by
being made to think about such subjects, are
quite certain to exhibit special predilections in
one place and special aversions in another, and
that the ascertainment of these predilections
and aversions will everywhere be made the
subject of painstaking thought. While nobody
seriously pretends nowadays that a taste for
literature or the arts can be inoculated upon a
child's understanding, I imagine that few will
question the belief that a natural bent for any
one of them can be assisted in its development,
and that taste, while it is incapable of being
artificially implanted, certainly is susceptible of

172 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

being guided and assisted. The defect of
routine teaching in aesthetics at present is the
defect of all our systems of education. We try
to do a scholar's thinking for him. We labori-
ously show him how to use a pencil and how to
copy drawings and pictures ; and sometimes
(though this kind of instruction is usually re-
tailed by the ingenious writers who endeavour
to instruct the adult public through the Press) we
even go to the trouble of telling him the kind
of pictures he ought to admire (usually for-
getting that in the house of Art there are many
mansions, and that a disgust for the early Dutch
masters does not necessarily imply an incapacity
for appreciating Velasquez) ; but, whether in
adolescence or maturity, we never seem to
arrive at the point of trying to get people to
think critically for themselves. We shall
reform altogether the processes of artistic
education in the course of this century,

The training of eye and hand will certainly
not be neglected. If only because learning
any kind of handicraft gives the keenest enjoy-
ment to children, we may be sure that manual
instruction will be given, and that the effect of
it will be of great value, not only recreative but
also practical. Our mechanics will not have
to inaugurate the wage-earning period of their
lives by the elementary acquisition of the use
of tools. Their future occupation will have
been foreseen, and both by scientific under-

EYE AND HAND 173

standing of the processes they are to subserve,
and by manual practice of the exact work they
are to perform, they will be prepared for in-
telligent craftsmanship ; the glorious fact that
real anxiety to find out the best possible
method of attaining the best possible results
makes every craft, however humble, not merely
delightful but also noble, being automatically
grasped, so that work, like learning, will be a
thing of joy and a source, to the worker, of
lifelong self-respect.

Thus in every department of education the
result of the training administered intelligently,
and with almost infinite long-sightedness and
subtlety during school-days, will be to form
character, not by repression of any natural
predilection, but by cultivation of mental and
moral impulses to good. We shall never be
content with an obedient abstention from mis-
conduct, but shall unrestingly contrive that the
desire to act rightly as well as wisely be im-
planted in the mind, until wisdom, righteous-
ness and forethought have been stamped upon
the character with so indelible an imprint that
it would do violence to the whole contour of
the mind to act in defiance of them. A people
thus trained will be capable of all the reforms
predicted of society a hundred years hence.
Not by any of the unimaginable cataclysms
by which dreamers have expected Utopia to
be established, ready-made, on a basis of

174 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

unreformed obedience to the will of fantastic
lawgivers, but by the steady growth of national
morality will progress,

" Moving as beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man,"

establish, on the basis of a perfect harmony
between the nature of the units and the in-
stitutions of society, the rationalised, moralised,
and still progressive state of the world looked
for by all who contemplate logically and with
ordered faith the capabilities of their kind a
hundred years hence.

CHAPTER IX

RELIGION : THE FINE ARTS : LITERATURE

A GOOD many people contemplate the future of
the world with an alarmed feeling that vast
material progress and enlarged knowledge of
the visible and tangible universe are likely to
be accompanied by intellectual developments
dangerous to the religious spirit in mankind.
But to consider thus is to overlook the manifest
trend of human thought at the present time.
Of the two influences named, material progress
and enlarged information about the universe,
the former is probably much more directly
liable to affect religious feeling adversely than
the latter. Epochs of high civilisation and
great luxury have often accompanied a general
tendency to scepticism, and these conditions
are also perhaps (and for the same reasons) not
highly favourable to the highest developments
of poetry. There have been periods of scientific
discovery which have coincided with the spread
of irreligion. During the second half of the
nineteenth century there was, for instance, no
doubt a great increase of popular scepticism

176 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

arising out of popular deductions (or supposed
deductions) from science. Religion unquestion-
ably lost ground in the sense that dogmatic
irreligion became rather fashionable. When
the people began to learn that geological
research had entirely upset the Biblical chrono-
logy, and that biological research had proved
the development of animal life by evolutionary
processes not compatible with a literal accept-
ance of the account of the creation in Genesis ;
when knowledge of the developments of
language proved that the various tongues of
mankind could not possibly have been the
subject of a sudden, cataclysmal " confusion"
at Babel or elsewhere, and when it became
common knowledge that the sun and stars were
not suddenly produced for the convenience of
man, but were, on the contrary, for the most
part much older, as suns and stars, than the
earth itself; it is not surprising that minds
untrained in philosophical deduction leaped
towards atheism, although, of course, none of
these discoveries has any more to do with
religion, as religion, than, say, chemistry has to
do with music. Unless one takes a highly
anthropomorphic view of the subject they are
not even inimical to revelation. Of course it
is open to anyone who chooses, to say that if
the statements in the Bible, said to be inspired,
are incorrect, the Creator (and Inspirer) either
did not know how He had done His work, or

ECONOMICAL ATHEISM 177

told untruths about it ; and consequently that
scientific discovery has disproved revelation.
But that is what I have called a highly anthropo-
morphic argument, and it may safely be left to
the apologists to demolish. Assuredly it is not
a sort of argument likely to be met with in
the cultured and logical future. But it was
an argument which commended itself very
widely to the uncultured and illogical past,
and great efforts were made to deal with it.
These efforts were really inimical to religious
faith. Religion having been declared to rest
upon the irrefragable rock of Holy Scripture,
there appeared to many excellent people an
urgent necessity that science should be set
right, that the theory of Evolution (by which
was meant, for these thinkers, Darwinism) must
be disproved : otherwise all faith must go by
the board, and the world must descend into
pure materialism. The Biblical criticism pro-
duced in Germany, and apparently received in
the very heart of the Christian camp, seemed
to plain men not merely to assail this irrefrag-
able rock but to strike at the roots of religion
itself. Atheism, having become unfashionable,
was exchanged from an " agnosticism " of which
the popular conception was not a great deal
more philosophical. The whole question of
religion was conceived to hang together. The

o o o

Bible was the Word of God : if the Bible could
not stand, God must fall. And the stability of

M

178 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

the Bible was considered to rest upon scientific
accuracy. A miscellaneous collection of writ-
ings, certainly of great, but of variously
computed antiquity, was to be absolutely right
(which no other documents of anything like the
same age have ever been) on scientific facts ;
otherwise it could not be retained as a text-book
of the churches. The latter (sometimes them-
selves claiming inspiration) had declared the
Bible to be directly inspired : and by some
people inspiration was taken to imply literal and
detailed truth, though literal and detailed truth
would certainly have made the collection utterly
incomprehensible by the persons who have used
it during all but the last comparatively insignifi-
cant portion of its existence, and to most persons
even then. Evidently such a conception of the
Bible, accompanied by the opinion that religion
could only exist on the basis of the Bible, was
dangerous to popular religion in proportion as
the opinions here summarised met with public
support.

Hardly less dangerous was the endeavour
of some apologists to assist the difficulty of
belief by attenuating the minimum required of
it. The exposure of their rather circular
arguments — basing Faith on the inspired
Bible, and the inspiration of the Bible on its
internal evidence— titillated in the untrained
thinker who had rejected (as he was en-
couraged to reject) the claim of the Church to

CHEAP APOLOGETICS 179

be the repository of inspired tradition, a sense
of his own logical acuteness. With a warm
glow of self-approval he abandoned the ancient
shibboleths and left off going to church, being
convinced that no really well-informed intelli-
gence could tolerate the mutual contradiction
of science and religion. With no more ability
to understand the arguments which supported
the one than the philosophy which lay at the
root of the other, and quite unaware that
religious belief is capable of development and
is as much a product of evolution as any
material phenomenon, he considered according
to temperament that religion was either a
mischievous invention calculated to clog the
progress of the world, or a pardonable aberra-
tion of amiable minds seeking consolation in
superstition of one sort or another. The
religiously-minded thinker of the same calibre
welcomed with enthusiasm the antagonisms of
scientific schools discovered for him by the
less wary of his teachers, and decided that
Darwin was wrong, that Huxley was following
false scents, and that science would have to
revise all its later conclusions. In neither
case (naturally) was

..." divine philosophy,
Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute,"

called into the assize. " Mistakes of Moses,"

180 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

to be either proved or justified, were popularly
supposed to be the touchstone of religion's
fate. Meanwhile, though the combatants in
the popular arena were quite unaware of it,
the true thinkers were realising vast depths
which science had left still unexplored, and the
very investigations undertaken to account for
the beginnings of life on this planet were prov-
ing the belief in the spontaneous generation of
life a figment. Whatever effect science may
have had upon myth, it was doing nothing to
assail the ultimate mystery which is the basic
fact of religion.

By degrees, too, the philosophical unten-
ableness of materialism began to be popularised,
and although it is a great deal easier to
accept (or decline) scientific discoveries with-
out understanding the evidence for or against
them than to grasp such abstract considera-
tions as the subjectivity of phenomena, popular
scepticism began to be directed into new
channels. If we could only know phenomena
we really know nothing ; and it was just as
likely that the most absurd myths of the
hagiologist might be true as that they might
be false — since one could know nothing.
Towards the end of the century there is no
doubt that among the masses of the people the
incomprehensibleness of things in general had
the effect of popularising a certain tolerance
of Christianity among the class which, a little

POPULAR PHILOSOPHY 181

earlier, had been repudiating it altogether ;
and if church-going, Sabbath-keeping and
other formal acts of religion continued to be
mentioned by the clergy and their adherents
as the subject of lamentable negligence, the
habits thus deplored arose, less and less from
conviction and more and more from taste.
People stayed away from church not because
they rejected Christianity but because church-
going bored them. If the clergy saw their
congregations dwindle they had themselves to
thank for it. The atrocious dulness of nearly
all sermons drove away more churchmen than
were lured from their pews by militant
irreligion. There is not the smallest reason to
believe that " free thought" propaganda had
any really important part in producing the
indifference denounced by the churches. The
simple fact is that a growing appetite for
amusements, athletic and other, and an in-
tolerance of the boredom inflicted by preachers
too indolent or too imperfectly educated to
make their discourses tolerable by an active
mind, robbed the churches of their visitors.
A good preacher never lacked a crowded
congregation even in the middle of a week-
day in the city of London ; nor are such con-
gregations lacking now.

No doubt the form of education generally
adopted in non-Catholic countries has been a
great cause of indifferentism. The fostering of

182 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

parental indolence by States which profess to
relieve it of the duty of religious as well as the
expense of other teaching, cannot tend to
promote religious education. To take our own
country for an example, fathers, who would
make it a duty to instil as well as they were
able the principles of their own faith into the
minds of their children if the board schools
were not supposed to teach Christianity, doubt-
less neglect that task in the existing conditions,
a fact which makes it quite easy to understand
why congregations are so largely made up of
elderly people, while boys and girls, not young
enough to be haled unwillingly to the parental
pew, and young men and maidens, young wives
and husbands " educated" on the prevailing
system, tend more and more to amuse them-
selves, not in irreligion but in indifference.
The squabbles of the sects have made it im-
possible to invest Christianity in board schools,
unless the law be flagrantly violated, with any
of the importance necessary to the foundation
of a genuinely religious spirit ; and the very
children find that religion is treated as a thing
of much less importance than sums or a good
handwriting. No one struggles and wrangles
about the right way to do long division. Long
division, therefore, is a settled thing and im-
portant. But everybody quarrels and snarls as
to who shall teach his particular kind of religion.
Religion, therefore, is a doubtful sort of thing,

CHURCH OR SCHOOL? 183

about which even grown-up people do not
agree. It cannot be of much importance. If
you ask father about it, he says it is the
teacher's business to answer you. And in
school, it has to be attended to at a certain
time so as not to interfere with the real business
of the day. Clearly it doesn't much matter ;
and the child resolves, as soon as it is old
enough, to escape from the weekly boredom of
sitting still for two hours in a stuffy church or
chapel, saying the same things over and over
again, and listening to a dull man in a sort of
elevated and ornamented witness-box talking
in a patronising tone about things not easy to
understand, and not in the least practically
useful when heard.

Of course this is not the only sort of influence
which has been at work to produce a result
likely to affect the attitude of the present
century towards the question. If the facts are
as I have stated them (which I do not think
anyone will dispute) we see one very good
reason why the younger generation is just now
somewhat irreligious. I do not believe it is
nearly as irreligious as many good people (on
both sides) think. But I do believe that we, at
all events, have as a nation been doing every
thing we can to make it so. There is no surer
way of preventing a thing's being done than
for the State to make a show of doing it and
then neglect it. If the school boards had

184 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

not assumed the duty of teaching children
Christianity, parents would have attended to
the matter, and probably done it a great deal
better than the boards could possibly have done
it, even in the best conditions. And if anyone
says that you can't teach Christianity, the reply
is, that in the sort of conditions which exist in
England at the present time, the religious spirit
is not favoured unless religion is taught. I
said at the beginning that the sort of life we
lead now, and that we are likely to go on living
during the next hundred years, is probably
more unfavourable to the spirit than any
directly irreligious influence of science or dis-
covery. People who are crowded into towns,
where they are out of constant touch with
Nature and the immensities of space, and lead
a hurried, busy existence unfavourable to deep
thought and mysticism, are much less liable to
yearn for some explanation of the vast incom-
prehensible universe, the profound misgivings
of the soul, than people who have other oppor-
tunities, who know the massive face of solitude
and have lain under the inscrutable stars. The
very frequency of terrible experience, when
death stalks in the streets and a funeral pro-
cession is so common a sight that men hardly
turn their unbared heads to look upon it,
blunts the sense of awe ; and in the cheap
Press the alleged humorist finds it a choice
subject for joking. A hundred years hence,

RELIGION, A.D. 2000 185

though I hope our humorous Press won't be
quite so ghastly, still more of us will have lived
always in cities, and been rarely intimate with
Nature. Unless, therefore, some new influences
supervene, it is likely that the new age will
be even less religiously inclined than the age
we live in. Is it probable that such an in-
fluence will arise ? Or will the next century
have turned its face altogether from faith and
given up in despair the world-old riddle of the
universe ?

Assuredly, with the increase, impossible to
be denied, of conditions unfavourable to church-
going, the influence which could arrest the
tendencies of thought at present supposed to
exist must be a powerful one. But in comput-
ing the exact potency which it would require to
possess we must take an accurate view of the
tendencies themselves. Now, although dog-
matic religion has to a certain extent lost
ground, and though formal observances are
somewhat neglected, it would be a fallacy to
consider that morality is in consequence retro-
grading. The steady growth of such things as
teetotalism ; the revolt of the public conscience
against tame stag hunting and against what
was aptly called " murderous millinery"; the
support afforded to the societies for the Protec-
tion of Children and for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals ; the generous responses
made to any appeal for public subscriptions to

OF THE

186 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

meet any great disaster ; the remarkable way
in which the working people, out of their miser-
able poverty, help each other in time of strikes ;
the waves of public indignation which the ex-
posure of any great injustice is able to arouse ;
all show that the world is by no means retro-
grade in respect of morals. What is often called
the growing sentimentality of the age, which
opens all pockets at the call of want, and doubt-
less sometimes leads to ridiculous exhibitions of
mistaken feeling, is a proof that the ethical
sense of the people is by no means blunt ; and
it shows a constant tendency to become keener.
It is mysticism rather than morality which is
chiefly lacking to a re-development of the
religious spirit. And although the opinions of
the mass of the people are likely to be in-
fluenced at all times more by the results at
which what are called leaders of thought arrive
than by the reasons which lead up to those
conclusions, it is rational to expect that with
the improved and much more thoroughly dis-
seminated education which the necessities of
the coming century are going to enforce upon
us, will make the people more accessible to
philosophical reasoning than they have ever
been since Socrates. Consequently, the general
attitude of the world a hundred years hence
towards mysticism will depend greatly upon
the conclusions of eminent thinkers. These
conclusions will require time in order to exercise

MYSTICISM, A.D. 2000 187

their influence ; but it seems probable that the
influence will be towards and not away from
mysticism.

An attempt to foresee the probable position,
as an institution, of religion in the future there-
fore demands the consideration of what net
result is likely to be deduced from science and
philosophy by the improved average intelligence
of this century. I speak expressly of religion
as an institution, intending thereby to limit the
inquiry to an attempt to determine the popular
view of religion ; the pretence to anticipate the
opinions of the great philosophers that this
century will no doubt produce being a little too
presumptuous even for the present writer,
who may not be considered in any event to
have fallen into many errors resulting from ex-
cessive modesty.

We can only come within reasonable limits
of safety and consistency in such an inquiry
by allowing here, as I have allowed all through,
for a great increase in general intelligence.
Probably the mass of the population will be less
greatly removed in reflective and reasoning
powers from the greatest minds than at present;
because the changes which have been predicted
are likely to have more effect in raising the
general standard of intelligence than in pro-
ducing individual and exceptional minds of
very great calibre.

No doubt the people will be in closer touch

188 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

with advanced thinkers than now. But I do
not see any reason for supposing that the
latter can be conspicuously greater than the
thinkers of past time, from Plato to Herbert
Spencer. Consequently it is impossible to
restrict the inquiry to strictly popular de-
velopments. We must ask what direction
abstract thought is likely to take : and it
certainly does not seem that the influence of
recent discoveries in physics — especially those
which have produced the new theory of the
constitution of the atom — can tend to
materialism. With atoms resolved by the
latest science into electrons, which have been
declared in a passage already cited to be
not merely carriers of electrical charge but
the electrical charges themselves, the objec-
tivity of matter has assuredly not received
any new support. And if speculation as to
the beginning of things (always the kind of
speculation most important to philosophy,
where philosophy is made the handmaid of
religion) is relieved of the necessity of
accounting for the creation of matter, and
only has to concern itself with the creation
of force, we evidently approach the more
abstract conception of a " Something not our-
selves " which is admittedly the philosophical
necessity most favourable to spiritual religion.

But for many people natural religion is a
poor alternative for revelation, and if we

REVEALED RELIGION, A.D. 2000 189

interrogate probability as to the future of a
faith in directly-revealed religion we approach
a much more difficult question. The verbal
inspiration of Scripture appears to be no
longer regarded as a necessity of this faith ;
and with its final abandonment we shall no
doubt enter upon a period of much more
abstract thought and of vaguer belief, but (as
I think) also a far more spiritual attitude
towards the Unseen. From the moment when
faith is relieved of all danger from the critical
discrediting of any particular set of documents,
it is of course freed from certain great dangers.
Probably the Christian of the year 2000 will
have abandoned all dependence upon the
authenticity of the original sources of informa-
tion, and will be quite ready to let what used
to be regarded as the foundations of belief take
their place with other mythologies. But this
position need not be regarded as irreligious ;
possibly it need not be considered un-Christian.
The hospitality which all truly religious thought
begins to extend, not merely to uncanonical
scriptures but to the best religious thought
of all ages, will strengthen rather than weaken
the spiritual attitude ; and, however we may
probe into the sciences of life and of the
universe, the awful mysteries which lie beyond
the sphere of science will always tempt man
to speculate and to aspire. Always we shall
yearn towards the eternities which preceded

190 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

and the eternities which must follow the little
interval that we call Time. Always beside the
grave that has closed upon what we have loved,
despair will lure us on to seek consolation in
a faith which promises re-union beyond the
bourn. Always the manifold injustice of Fate
will make aspiration inevitable. Always the
uplifting spectacle of the stars, the immensities
of ocean and infinite mysteries of the soul of
man will make us welcome the spiritual teach-
ing which can throw gleams of mystic illumina-
tion upon the riddles of the universe and
justify the ways of God to man. We may
not always see our way to find efficacy in
ritual incense ; we may not long continue to
ask direct interventions of the Deity in prayers
which we know in a literal sense to be un-
thinkable and profane ; we may cease the
impertinence of offering suggestions to the
Maker of the world on the subject of next
week's weather ; and yet when we uplift our
hearts in aspiration and beg that we may
divine more spiritually the nature of the
Creator, and learn to love our neighbour
more effectually and with a better enlighten-
ment, we may still pray and know that our
prayer is answered. If we cease to think
that wicked men descend into some chastise-
ment of which fire and flames are the
abandoned symbols, we may still realise that
none can act against the moral intuitions of

PRAYER, A.D. 2000 191

his nature without mutilating his own soul :
and if this soul of man be immortal, its punish-
ment is thus eternal also, and can be cancelled
only by the act of divine mercy which we
shall still call man's redemption. We begin
to know something of the mind's independence
of the body where (in phenomena of which
evidence seems to be accumulating) mind can
speak to mind by other means than the senses :
and everything which points that way cuts
fresh ground from under the notion that bodily
death is the end of us. Although the philo-
sophical theory of immortality does not need
this evidence, faith is assisted by it. On the
great ideas which are the support and justifica-
tion of religion there seems no reason to suppose
that the discoveries of the next hundred years
are likely to throw discredit.

To sum up, then, I believe that the effect of
improved education will be to conserve rather
than to destroy religion ; but I do not believe
that religion will be a historical so much as a
philosophical conception. The present great
obstacle to religious feeling in non-Catholic
countries, namely the pretence of the State to
" teach religion " as if it were a science or an
art, will have been removed some while before
this time next century, and individual effort
will be cultivated in this, as in certain other
respects, instead of being repressed. The
Bible will be read for its morals, its poetry, its

192 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

literature; and the aspiration to conceive the
Divine will continue to take the shape of some
kind of public worship probably much unlike
anything which we now practise, and totally
divorced from any faith in miracles and verbal
inspiration. In religion men will seek their
consolation against the buffeting and injustice
of destiny, and in a more reasoned notion of
immortality dry their eyes before the poignant
spectacle of Death.

The whole tendency of the modern mind is
to become more spiritually imaginative. We
are often scornfully told that this is an age of
hysteria, when the mere fact is that it is an age
of imagination. The highly civilised life of
our day x naturally exalts intelligence in com-
parison with mere activity of body ; mind gains
ascendency over muscle. It is much more im-
portant to worldly success just now that a man
should be able to think accurately than that he
should be able to lift great weights, endure
great physical fatigues or fight satisfactorily.
Consequently, there is a great premium upon
intelligence, and only a much smaller premium
upon bodily strength ; and this condition of
affairs is likely to become accentuated as the
present century develops. With increase of
intellectual agility we obtain increase of subtlety
and intuition, and of those finer perceptive and

1 Over-civilised, if one please, but I do not admit for an
instant that man can be over-civilised.

THE FINE ARTS, A.D. 2000 193

critical faculties which make expression of the
emotions important and interesting. It has
often been argued that epochs of high civilisa-
tion are unfavourable to poetry and the fine
arts, and a well-known passage of Macaulay
argues the point at some length. Whether
such an epoch as that of a hundred years hence
be probably fertile in art or no, assuredly
appreciation of the fine arts will be widespread
and acute. Of course you can never account
for the extraordinary phenomenon called genius,
and while it is no doubt true that genius, like
everything else, is the product of its age, yet
genius consistently transcends its age. The
number of minds in a thousand able to bring a
reasonable degree of competent appreciation to
the writings of Shakespeare is much greater
now than when Shakespeare wrote. There
never was a time when a great writer, or a
great painter (despite what happened to
Whistler) was in less danger of public neglect
than the present. And the next century will
be yet more critical than this. Every one of
the fine arts will be more generally and more
subtly appreciated than now. The existing
masterpieces of antiquity will be even more
reverently enjoyed than now, and the lessons
they embody will be more completely assimi-
lated. It reniains to be answered, whether the
next century will be fertile in new masterpieces
of literature and art.

194 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

There has been, in my opinion, too great a
readiness on the part of most writers to assume
that high civilisation necessarily creates epochs
of ugliness. No doubt railways, factories and
other civilised and civilising conveniences do
not, in the natural course of things, tend to
assume forms gratifying to the sesthetician.
The present tendency of domestic architec-
ture, for instance, shows an abject sort of
spirit by basing any effort which it may
make for comeliness on an attempt to imitate the
picturesqueness of the past rather than to form
new and beautiful styles adapted to modern
requirements. Because old red-brick, timbered
rough-cast, and the quaintly-shaped buildings
of old time please the eye by contrast more
than by inherent beauty, unintelligent builders
just now think they can redeem dwelling-
houses from plain ugliness by imitating these
peculiarities, and they are encouraged in this
course by the people who are to live in such
houses and by the exploiters of estate develop-
ment. But such fine examples as the new West-
minster Cathedral show that the spirit of beauty
has not left our architects. The growing
intelligence of the new age ought, at all
events, to develop, as its resources will reward,
originality. And the developed aestheticism of
the age will demand beautiful buildings, not
slavishly copied from the antique, but created
by the imagination of the modern. Reverence

ARCHITECTURE, A.D. 2000 195

for natural beauty, already manifest in the
revolt against advertisement-boards in juxta-
position with notable scenery and even along
the sides of railways (where one would have
thought that a little more ugliness could do no
great harm) will no doubt be accentuated when
theunviolated virginities of Nature have become
fewer ; and a steady growth of public taste is
evidenced even now by the success of the better
sort of street advertisements and the failure of
the uglier kind, as demonstrated by the steady
abandonment of the latter. The most fashion-
able artists no longer think it beneath them to
design wall-posters. If the advertisers who
pay their large fees find it profitable to purchase
art in an expensive market, it must be because
popular taste is better than it used to be ; and
even if the cult of the photograph and the
process block in illustrated newspapers, to the
detriment of drawings and wood engravings,
be cited as evidence in the other direction, we
have a right to quote in rebuttal of this the
rather violent efforts of the more intelligent
class of amateurs to secure a recognition of
selective and manipulated photography as an
art. Moreover, just as some critics have
argued that it is better for the people to read
the atrocious letterpress of the popular papers
than not to read anything, it can also presum-
ably be contended that it is better for the
people to look at photographs reproduced by

196 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

" process " than not to look at any pictures at
all, though, in reality, it is doubtful whether
bad pictures and inferior " literature" are not
much worse and much more degrading to
popular taste than none. That we really do
care for pictures even in England (however
little critical ability we may possess to dis-
tinguish good pictures from bad) is evidenced
by the crowds which throng the Royal
Academy. It would be better if they thronged
the National Gallery ; but even the Royal
Academy is evidence : and the success of the
sixpenny-admission plan on the days when it is
adopted, and the large attendance at Burlington
House on Bank Holidays, prove that the taste
for pictures is shared even by the least educated
part of the public. Thus there is no reason to
be found in present tendencies for apprehending
a decay of sestheticism as a result of material
progress. Probably even the cheap papers
will eventually improve, both in their read-
ing-matter and in their illustrations, when
it grows less profitable than it is at present
to print the worst attainable examples of
both.

Of course it would be very easy to argue
that the tendency of all this is rather to develop
a somewhat higher standard of mediocrity than
to produce brilliant examples of art in any
manifestation. Beauty, up to a certain point,
can be bought. The demand will evoke the

SCULPTURE, A.D. 2000 197

supply. But the highest manifestations of the
beautiful must be the spontaneous product of
subtle brains and lissom fingers working for
Art's sake. Yet it is also not very difficult to
show that circumstances affect production even
of the highest. An example may be found in
the extraordinary merit of modern French
sculpture, as compared with the wretched work
produced in England. In the Paris Salon,
which may be said to correspond with our
Royal Academy, sculpture is shown in a
manner which renders the huddled cloak-room
full of mediocre marble and third-rate work in
clay at Burlington House almost too painful to
be ludicrous. However meritorious the work
of an English statuary, he would get no chance
—does get no chance — in the Academy
exhibition : and there is every justification for
the opinion that it is not bad work which in
this country produces official neglect, nor good
work which in France has for many years led
to the loving care with which sculpture is
shown in Paris ; but on the contrary, that the
real opportunity which a French sculptor
obtains has been just as instrumental in foster-
ing the art there as our own utter neglect to
appreciate sculpture of genius has been in
stifling the art here. The French treatment
of sculpture has not merely raised the standard
of average production. It has fostered actual
genius. Even so the opportunities which the

198 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

social conditions of a hundred years hence will
afford to art will assuredly promote the artistic
conditions favourable to the development and
fostering of genius, whenever genius, in its
shy, fairy-like way, contrives to be born, no
man knows how. A general power of appreci-
ating masterpieces has never been alleged to
be unfavourable to their production. What is
unfavourable to it in a highly civilised age is
the hurry and preoccupation which leave no
time for the appreciative faculties to employ
themselves. It has been very well said that
the feature most inimical to art in American
civilisation is the absence of a " leisure class."
If there be any validity in the conclusions for
which I have been trying to win acceptance1
in the earlier chapters of this work, the new
age will be an age of greatly increased leisure
in all ranks, and this condition ought to favour
art in every way as highly as the improvement
in the nature as well as in the extent of educa-
tion must also favour it. And in this there will
be both action and reaction — increased leisure
and improved appreciation tending to foster
genius, genius in the glorious perfection of its
work generously returning the benefit by culti-
vating and refining the aesthetic sense of the
new age.

Similarly in literature we may hope that the
atrocious consequences of instruction applied
1 Ante, Chapter III.

LITERATURE, A.D. 2000 199

to a vast number of minds which no attempt
is made to educate will be only temporary.
Popular " literature " and journalism at the
present time might well strike with despair
the most hopeful heart. But when we re-
member that no attempt whatever is being
made to educate the faculty of imagination,
and that we stubbornly restrict all teaching
to a vehement effort to cram as many facts as
possible into the mind of the scholar, with no
endeavour at all to improve the qualities of
that mind itself; and when we grant, as I
think any reasonably intelligent prevision of
the future must grant, that all this will before
many decades have to give place to really
educational processes : it seems evident that
the future will gradually fling aside in deserved
contempt the basely illiterate products of the
printing press which enrich popular publishers
and newspaper proprietors to-day, redeem
poetry from its present practical neglect, and
revive and enrich the belles lettres, which,
even in the latter part of the nineteenth
century and these latter years of the dawning
twentieth century, have contrived to appear
in masterpieces for which readers, fit, if few,
have never ceased to exist. One result of
this will be to end, and end for ever, the
idiotic and reactionary policy of " limited
editions " for beautiful books, by which alone,
in many cases, the production of such books

200 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

has been made possible. As the public for
fine literature decently printed becomes gradu-
ally larger, there will no longer be any object
in accentuating popular ignorance by with-
holding from the greatest part of the public the
opportunity to possess and to enjoy the best
work in letters that the age is producing, and
it will be possible for the poet of delicate
imagination, the essayist of subtle insight,
and the story-teller of restrained and modest
genius, to be as well paid as the inventors
of nightmare horrors and the biographers of
impossibly ingenious detectives apparently
are to-day.

There remains to be considered the much
less difficult problem of the sort of progress
likely to be made in the mechanical implements
of the fine arts. Some conceivable develop-
ments in what may be called the mechanism of
literature have been discussed in the chapter
on journalism, and just as it was there predicted
that the forms of language hallowed by tradi-
tion and made classic by antiquity and intrinsic
beauty must always continue to be employed,
so in the arts it is impossible to believe that
the classical methods of expression can ever
become obsolete. But to say this is not to im-
ply that new processes are incapable of being
applied to the arts. Nothing which the future
may evolve as a modelling substance can con-
ceivably render obsolete clay or make marble

THE FUTURE OF MUSIC 201

antiquated ; but innovation is always possible
and may always in the right hands yield new
tributes of loveliness. Prejudice is difficult to
overcome where art is in question. But as was
recently seen in the invention of solid oil paints,
new media are quite capable of creating new
modes of expression, and daring as is the flight
of imagination required by such a notion, may
it not be conceived that the new methods of
intercommunication between mind and mind,
which may develop out of the new psychology
of our own age, might furnish the medium of a
new literature ?

In music it does not seem necessary to
surmise that the classical gamut must be the
last word of melodic thought. The barrier be-
tween East and West in regard to musical ex-
pression— a barrier as yet so firm as to make us
feel that " never the twain can meet" — is pre-
cisely of this nature. A remark by an Indian
scholar educated in England, and as well versed
in Western as in Eastern art, is pregnant of
promise. He said to a friend of the present
writer, " There is no doubt that in every form
of invention, in every development of intellect,
you surpass us, save in one. Your music is
poor and mean, compared with the music of
the East."

Now to any English ear the music of
Asia is as yet a mere snarl of incomprehensible
cacophonies, destitute alike of melody, harmony

202 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

or rhythm. But that it has laws of its own,
intricate, involved and subtle, no one can doubt.
I remember, one night, finding my way into a
Chinese lodging-house in an Australian city.
From one of the cubicles with which it was
filled came what seemed to me u a rueful noise
and a ghastful " — a noise as if some more than
usually vocal tom-cat were being severely ill-
used.

From time to time the noise ceased, to
be succeeded by energetic disputations in the
thin nasal and guttural tones of South China,
themselves, I knew, graduated in pitch, as all
Chinese talk requires to be in order to be
understood. Making my way to the source of
these sounds, I found four young Chinamen.
One of them was engaged in an unabashed
bathing of his lower limbs. Other two were
squatting on the floor to enjoy the music of the
fourth, who sat on a high packing-case, holding
a book in his toes, and performing on an instru-
ment something like a violin. From time to
time one of the others would interrupt, criticis-
ing the executant, and the book would then be
referred to with energy and something as much
like excitement as one ever sees a Chinaman
display. The musician would extract a few
notes from the instrument, clearly in defence of
his rendering. Then the tumult would die down
while the wailing of the smitten strings went on
again.

THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE 203

Now it cannot be impossible to fathom
the obscurities of Oriental music : and it is
quite possible that they may, in the future,
yield new harmonies and melodies as yet
undreamed-of to the West ; for the differ-
ence is mainly, if I understand aright what
Orientals say of it, a difference of scale. No
doubt the conventions are all different. I
have often observed in India that music con-
sidered to possess a jovial character is a
shrill wailing in slow time ; whereas funereal
music always sounds a lively air. Western
civilisation finds no difficulty in comprehend-
ing the decorative art of India and the Far
East, nor in highly appreciating it. May
not Eastern music have gifts for us as yet
undreamed-of?

But of course painting has a much more
direct appeal to the emotions than music, and it
is not at all difficult to imagine — nay, it is hardly
possible to doubt — that a new manner in
painting will from time to time develop,
arriving out of newly-invented implements
and materials.

Doubtless improved methods of reproduction
will multiply the numbers of those who can
enjoy the masterpieces of the new age and of
the old, just as in music it will unquestionably
be possible to repeat satisfactorily an indefinite
number of times any sounds that have once
existed. Neither will any of the arts per-

204 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

manently suffer by the mechanical improve-
ments applied to them — though the first
employment of the latter will doubtless often
have results which will be, to the artist, rather
terrible.

CHAPTER X

THE AGE OF ECONOMIES

THE next century will certainly be a frugal
age in the sense of planetary frugality. With
a greatly-increased call on the resources of the
world entailed by the vast increase of popula-
tion it will be absolutely necessary for us to
"make the most of what we here do spend."
And with the more humane and gentler notions
which will prevail it is also certain that the
new age will be an age of cheapness. Of
course, cheapness is a purely relative matter.
The suit of clothes which would be very cheap
at seven guineas in the United States would
be very dear at that price here, not merely
because by reason of the tariff clothes and
other things are expensive in America, but
also because wages are higher there than in
England. In spite of the enormous growth of
population since, say, the accession of Queen
Victoria, the standard of comfort is much
higher now than then, and prices are lower,
because production has increased more quickly
than population. Comforts are cheaper, wages

205

206 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

are higher. But the standard of comfort will
be higher still a hundred years hence. Work-
men will earn a greater share of the com-
modities of life, and whether their pay be
higher, computed as money, or lower, makes
no difference to the question of cheapness.
If wages are low commodities will be low-
priced : that is all.

And probably this is the turn that events
will take, though, even then, the monetary
earnings of the worker will probably be much
higher than they are nowadays. It is doubt-
ful whether so clumsy a contrivance as metallic
currencies, of intrinsic values corresponding
with their titles, can survive at all ; but of
course everything will be computed in terms
of some currency or other — perhaps of an
obsolete currency. We are apt to think that
the steady value of gold can be counted upon
to remain a constant factor of economics. But
only a very small part of the real business of
the world is even now transacted with actual
gold. Much the greatest part is transacted
in paper — that is by the simple balancing of
debits against credits in various clearing-
houses.

Of course, if there were any reason to
suppose that State Socialism would be the
political basis of future institutions, currency
of intrinsic value (which practically means,
even now, only gold currency) would be easily

THE AGE OF ECONOMIES 207

dispensed with, because almost every trans-
action would be effected by means of orders
on the national treasury, the State owning
practically everything. Some visionaries have
long included the abolition of money in their
schemes for the immediate economic improve-
ment of the race. But the disuse of a currency
is not really a means to any end. It is only
an effect which may or may not arise out of
certain alterations in commercial method.
There are signs that the people are already
growing tired of the extravagance attached
to the system of State, and even of municipal,
trading : and this fact makes socialism improb-
able. Constant complaints are heard about such
things as municipal tramways and municipal
gasworks, and the proposal to transfer the
entire working of telephones to the Govern-
ment has been fiercely opposed. Where the
post-office works telephones side by side with
a telephone company, as in London, there is
no indication that the public prefers the
Government service before the private service ;
and it is admitted that tramways privately
owned work more cheaply and yield better
returns on their capital than municipal tram-
ways. Any interference of the State in matters
that could practically be left to private enter-
prise provokes incessant complaint. When
continued and developed, however, this inter-
ference has a vicious habit of extending itself

208 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

into fresh fields. Having first undertaken the
education of the people the State was not
long in carrying that system to its natural
limit by relieving parents of school fees.
Now, free meals for poor children, or meals sold
below cost, are gradually becoming the fashion ;
what is the use of reading out lessons to
children who are too hungry to listen ? So
the State must feed as well as educate. From
this to the free clothing of school children is a
very short step. But once the unavoidable
sequence of such things is recognised, public
opinion begins to revolt, asking where, if we
go on at this rate, we are likely to stop, so
long as there is any parental duty that the
State has omitted to assume. We perceive
that, unless the process is arrested, the
begetter of children will have no obligations
left, and the awful effects of relieving every
member of the public of all responsibility being
at length recognised, there is sure to be a
reaction. It is certainly not beyond the wit
of man to contrive that it shall be impossible
for parents to leave their children untaught,
without Government taking upon itself the
function of schoolmaster. A hundred years
hence I hope that it will long have been un-
necessary to use force at all to compel parents
to educate their children : and by that time the
folly of our (perhaps temporarily unavoidable)
expedients will be laughed at, and the fatuity

SOCIALISM 209

of a minimum standard of proficiency, which
inevitably becomes the maximum standard
also, will be wondered at. In the matter
here selected as the most convenient for illus-
tration, and in other matters where State powers,
or powers devolved by the State, are now
employed in enterprises which do not properly
fall into the province of Governments, the
abuses and wastefulness of governmental in-
terference are already acting as the best
possible object-lessons against further inter-
ferences of the kind which makes for socialism.

But of all the restraining influences inimical
to socialism, none will be anything like so
powerful in the present century as the new
anxiety with which the people will safeguard
their own self-respect. It must be borne in
mind, and cannot be too often repeated, that
before many decades, systems of education will
be valued chiefly in proportion as they tend
to develop and establish character in the
individual. And with the recognition of the
great truth that character is much the most
important thing in the world, there will grow
up a great jealousy of anything which tends to
damage the public sense of individual responsi-
bility. This jealousy cannot but be adverse
to socialism, whose ideal is to relieve the
individual of all responsibilities and to throw
them upon committees.

Not that the value of organisation and

210 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

combination for various objects will at all be
lost sight of. But we shall perceive that
voluntary combination is a form of self-govern-
ment vastly more friendly to the preservation
of self-respect than legislative action, and also
a form much less likely to be oppressive. It
will be seen, for instance, that it is more
desirable for working men to fix, through
their trade-unions, the hours of labour in
various industries, arranging to meet excep-
tional circumstances where the latter arise,
than for Parliament to decree that nobody shall
work more than eight hours a day. Neither
is the panacea of compulsory arbitration in
trade disputes likely to be a feature of future
politics, because we shall certainly not be long
before we perceive that, while it is no doubt
quite easy to compel employers and employed
to submit their respective cases to a tribunal
appointed by law, there is no known way in
which the award of such a tribunal can be
enforced, and if there were, the effect of its
employment would be almost intolerably
injurious to the commerce of the country.
What will happen a hundred years hence is
that trade disputes will have disappeared,
because all the workers will be practically their
own employers.

Consequently free contract and not socialism
will be the basis of the political system of a
hundred years hence, and the standard of

ECONOMISED MUSCLE 211

comfort will be adjusted in the same way as
everything else. But in order that this
standard may be as high as the advanced
humanity of the new age will certainly demand
for a population vastly increased, it will be
necessary that all the resources of the planet
be made the most of. That motive power,
one of the most important, if not the most
important of all these resources, should be
economically produced is, as has already been
said, an absolute essential. When we make
the most of the sources of power, and are able
to apply power in convenient and portable
ways to all sorts of work at present done by
hand, one of the greatest economies conceivable
will have been effected. Probably muscle, as
an element of workmanship, will become quite
obsolete, though muscular strength will be
developed by athletics as a recreation and a
safeguard to the health of the race. Here again
self-respect will be sedulously nurtured, for
nothing fosters it so much as a man's sense of
his inherent bodily power. All sorts of waste-
fully laborious methods of labour will be super-
seded, in the same way as the steam hammer has
superseded the sledge hammer. With the per-
fect development of power-production achieved,
a great deal of the dirtiness of manufacture will
vanish : and moreover, a use will have been
discovered for every by-product of every
manufacture. We are hideously wasteful as

212 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

yet : and wastefulness makes for dirt. One
perceives this at once on comparing a factory
where the by-products are of a nature to be
utilised directly, with one where these products
are of small value. A goldsmith's shop is a
clean place compared with the gasworks of
even a modern town : but these again are
clean compared with what they used to be be-
fore the various chemical uses of coal-tar and
gas-liquor were discovered.

In the planning of machinery, notwithstand-
ing the fact that power will be obtained at a
minimum of expense, all contrivances which
economise force will be highly valued. We
have been increasingly valuing them ever since
steam first became important as a source of
motive power. Early machines in the Patents'
Museum at South Kensington exhibit the most
extraordinary recklessness in the waste of
power. Considering the feebleness of the
motive force available, one would have
expected that every means would be sought
to minimise friction. But instead, the force was
transmitted by contrivances which, to a modern
eye, seemed deliberately contrived to introduce
as much friction as possible. Every year
brings out fresh inventions for the avoidance
of friction : and still we are but upon the very
threshold of the subject. It was only in 1904
that a party of railway engineers was enter-
tained by a patentee who wished to show them

WASTE OF POWER 213

the saving in coal per train-mile which can be
saved by a new bearing for passenger coaches,
and the superior smoothness (which is of course
a factor in the economy) of their running.
Hardly any vehicle except a bicycle or a
trotting buggy is yet constructed with any
serious attempt to save friction at the axles.
The number of industrial machines to which
ball-bearings might be applied with great
economy of power is enormous. But ball-
bearings are very little used. It is probably
considered as yet that the saving in coal would
not pay for the working expenses connected
with them and with other improvements. But
as machinery is further improved economies
at present merely theoretical will become
practical and remunerative. In a hundred
years' time we shall certainly be able to make
generally profitable the use of many devices as
yet applicable only to delicate and exceptional
machines, and shall be able to use much power
which at present runs to waste. Every time
a locomotive is stopped there is a great waste
of power in the operation of the brakes, be-
cause it is not worth while to adopt any con-
trivance for utilising it. It disappears, as heat,
and is lost. Many similar wastages could be
cited, and engineers would scoff at the citation,
on the ground that the loss is not worth
saving. But it will be worth saving a hundred
years hence. We shall not be able to afford

214 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

any waste. The world will have to be worked,
as we say, " for all it is worth."

Of course all sorts of other wastes will be
avoided through the natural progress of dis-
covery and the natural development of thought.
Illness is a waste. Illness will be much less
common in a hundred years' time. A man
who eats and consumes the world's products
without contributing to them will be too ex-
pensive a luxury for the new age to indulge
itself with : and the present excuse for a
" leisure" class — already scorned in America —
that a rich and leisured class fosters and patron-
ises the arts, will be absurd. All classes will
foster and patronise the arts. For, just as we
shall see that idleness is waste (and even more
injurious to the idler than to his fellows), so we
shall also see that overwork is a waste, because
the legitimate purpose of human endeavour is
not wealth, but happiness. When all work, all
will be able to play.

Planetary economy will be a determining
factor in the change of diet which the coming
century must inevitably witness. Such a waste-
ful food as animal flesh cannot survive : and
even apart from the moral necessity which will
compel mankind, for its own preservation, to
abandon the use of alcohol, the direct and in-
direct wastefulness of alcohol will make it im-
possible for beverages containing it to be
tolerated. Very likely tobacco will follow it.

SEWAGE, A.D. 2000 215

We are already in sight of legislation to restrain
the use of tobacco by the young. It will prob-
ably be unnecessary for the law to prohibit its
use by adults. The frugal adult of the new
age will abandon it unbidden, the change taking
place as smoothly and silently as the process
from the universal drunkenness of our great-
grandfathers to the relative sobriety of our-
selves, a process of which it is surprising that
anyone can fail to perceive that the natural end
must be the total disuse of alcoholic drinks.
All things work their way to their natural con-
clusion, and there is no more fertile source of
sociological blindness than the fallacy which
treats certain phenomena of society as static,
whereas all phenomena of society are really in
the dynamic state, and always must be so.

In such matters as the exhaustion of the
soil, and the reckless waste of wood, our present
practice will certainly be reformed. There will
be great improvements in agricultural chem-
istry, necessitated by the disappearance of
animal manure. The obsolescence of the horse
is already in sight ; probably we ourselves shall
see the day when the horse will cease to be
employed except in the organised material of
war : and as soon as we cease to eat animals
we shall cease to herd cattle, sheep and poultry.
But some means will have to be found for
returning to the soil the materials we take out
of it. Of course the idiotic wastefulness of

216 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

many systems of sewage disposal, and the
dangers, inconveniences and degrading occupa-
tions associated with existing alternatives, will
be rectified. By improved agricultural methods,
lands at present unutilised will be brought
under cultivation : and the wasteful and selfish
reservation of game preserves, deer forests
and excessive pleasure-grounds will have to be
abolished — not by legislative enactment, but
probably by spontaneous social developments ;
by the natural development, in short, of economy
in the world's possessions. A hundred years
hence we shall cease to behave as though the
resources of the planet were illimitable and
could be wasted at will. In the succession of
the ages the spendthrift will have given birth
to the miser, reversing the usual order of gen-
erations. No doubt the attention concentrated
upon agriculture as a consequence of the
greatly increased use of vegetable and cereal
foods will have, as one of its consequences, the
discovery of new means for improving all sorts
of crops — means of which even the wonderful
achievements of the scientific agriculture of the
present day do not contain even the first germs.
. We shall also, perhaps, find means for avoiding
the terrible losses and wastage entailed by
climatic accidents. At all events, irrigation
will be perfected, and probably we shall be able
by acclimatisation and modification to find uses
for crops that will flourish during that portion

SEWAGE, A.D. 2000 217

of the year when, in temperate climates, the
land at present lies idle. This will both
stimulate and further necessitate the im-
provements in agricultural chemistry already
mentioned.

As the combustions of solids will no longer
be a general method of obtaining heat, we shall
greatly economise wood ; and the wickedly
mischievous word " inexhaustible " will not be
applied to timber regions like the Rocky Moun-
tain district of Canada. Arboriculture will
become a more practical art than it as yet
shows any signs of being ; and along with care-
ful afforestation will go skilled improvement
in tree-growing. We shall replace all the trees
we use by better trees, better cultivated. Even
so, however, there will have to be devised great
economies in the use of wood — economies like
the recent invention of a method by which, in-
stead of being wastefully sawn into planks, a
tree-trunk can be cut up spirally, so that almost
the whole of it may be used. In many places
where wood is now employed in the arts, metals
will doubtless be used instead, their greater
neatness and durability making it advisable
thus to substitute them, for reasons of conveni-
ence as well as economy ; and probably new
alloys, into which the lighter metals, as alu-
minium, will enter, may give us increased
strength without increased weight, which will
again be an economy, because it will save power.

218 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

But even so, the world's expenditure of wood
will continue to be enormous.

War has been alluded to above. War is too
wasteful, as well as too imbecilely uncivilised,
to survive this century. It may be well to
inquire as to the manner in which its abolition
is most likely to be brought about. We may
take it for granted that no sudden political or
revolutionary movement will abolish the physi-
cal conflict of peoples. " All the arts which
brutalise the practical polemist" will not be
abandoned at a moment's notice on the bid-
ding of any potentate or combination of poten-
tates. To conceive of them as thus abandoned
is to overlook the whole nature of political
change. It is absurd (as Herbert Spencer
remarks) to assume <c that out of a community
morally imperfect and intellectually imperfect,
there may in some way be had legislative regu-
lation that is not proportionately imperfect."
But it would be equally absurd to believe that
the moral and intellectual advance which our
present tendencies show to be gradually tak-
ing place — an advance certain to be greatly
accelerated during the middle half of the next
hundred years — can fail to put a stop to war as
a political device.

War will probably not be dispensed with in
response to any great and sudden revolt of the
world's conscience against the bloodshed and
other evils much worse than bloodshed which

WAR AS A WASTE 219

it entails — of which indeed it actually consists.
The world knows quite well already that war
is wicked, wasteful and silly : if it were
possible for a suddenly-exasperated realisation
of this to take an instantaneous effect, we could
and should similarly abolish numerous other
evils which we show every disposition to
tolerate for some time yet. The fact that single
families are able to hold wealth in enormous
excess of the maximum amount which it can
possibly be good for the community that in-
dividuals should hold, is such an evil. The
" Yellow " journalism of America and England
is another evil just about as difficult, or as easy,
to abolish at a stroke as war, and not much
less injurious. The manipulation of tariffs and
currencies to suit the greedy aims of manu-
facturers, landowners and capitalists is another
evil which is constantly experienced or
threatened in one part of the world or another ;
and if as a race we were yet enlightened
enough to utter that great " Peace ; be still ! "
which must some day be breathed over the
troubled waters of international diplomacy, we
should be enlightened enough to rid ourselves
of these other evils. But instead, the change
must be gradually worked up to. It is not even
at all certain that the whole world will at one
given moment decide to abandon war. It is
not necessarily the case that the first nation
enlightened enough to lay down the sword

220 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

would immediately fall under the oppression of
its armed neighbours, as Bismarck prophesied,
and would no doubt have practised to arrange.
Nor need we assume, as so many have thought
it necessary to believe, that universal peace
can only follow the exhaustion of universal
war, the dove winging her first flight over the
shambles of Armageddon. I do not for an
instant believe that the actual horrors of war
are the likely or possible source of peace ; on
the contrary, war always tends to breed war,
partly through international exasperation,
partly through the unashamed and cynical
self-seeking of professional warriors. Peace
hath her outrages no less severe than war. It
is against the preparation for war, rather than
against war itself, that we shall revolt.

Of course the increased urbanity of future
thought, the tenderer conscience of the future,
will help the cause of peace. The world's
rulers will be more humane, less reckless than
those set up by the inferior morality and in-
tellect of the present age. It is not from the
rulers, but from the ruled, however, that peace
will come. It is the peoples that will refuse to
be the supporters of idle, useless, profligate and
dangerous millions, trained to no duty but
slaughter, skilful only in the service of national
crime. Every decade will see the burden of
armament grow heavier. I n every decade fresh
efforts will be made* to lift the weight of them

THE PEACE OF DIVES 221

off the rich, the governing classes, and throw it
upon the poor, the governed classes. The
workers will be taxed, and their taxes mani-
pulated to their disadvantage. And they must
pay in person as well as purse. There is no
civilised and highly developed country in the
world that can possibly escape universal mili-
tary service within the next quarter of a cen-
tury, unless it be the United States : and only
that country if the people of the United States
abandon absolutely their present dreams of
empire and renounce the luxury of an effective
Foreign Office. As for ourselves, it is most
likely universal naval service that we shall
have to endure. And the rulers of the nations
will play the chess of diplomacy, using the
peoples as their pawns, until the pawns, grown
wiser than the bishops, and more agile than the
knights, reach the eighth square of intellect
and become sovereign in themselves. It is not
by high diplomacy that war will be abandoned,
but by the will of the workers. Only a very
careless and unthoughtful observer of the last
fifteen years' history can have failed to note the
steady growth of international solidarity in
labour questions. The trade societies of
different nations frequently contribute to each
other's strike-funds : they constantly com-
municate and confer, and they do so with
increasing frequency and effectiveness every
time there is any special advantage to be seen

222 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

in joint action against the common enemy —
greed. Conceive for an instant what is going
to be the effect of this when working men and
women, infinitely the most important and most
worthy part of the race, are no longer degraded
by stupid restrictions of education, no longer
brought up on the insane system of striving
only for a stuffed memory instead of for a de-
veloped character, and have learned to think
about their political duties instead of only trans-
acting them without thought, without any
possible opportunity of learning how to think.
The whole mass of workers throughout the
world will come to an understanding. They
have no possible conflicting interests which can
compare in importance with the interests which,
for their class, are identical all the world over.
Already the improved morality of the peoples
will have yielded improved governments, more
enlightened parliaments, wiser statesmanship.
The administrative organ will only need to be
properly stimulated by the solid agreement of
workers throughout civilisation. There is never
the least sign of international or racial jealousy
among working men in their international
relations, and what, by reason of the clash of
international interests and the danger of
national aggression diplomatists could not
accomplish, the irresistible volition of the un-
animous peoples will force upon the cabinets of
the world. It will come about by degrees.

THE PROLETARIAT AND PEACE 223

The preparations for it will be long visible, long-
misunderstood. And we shall usefully tinker
at the question, often stave off little dangers of
war by arbitrations, treaties of mutual under-
standing, peace conferences and the like ; and
though probably no great war necessary to re-
concile the conflicting destinies of peoples was
ever prevented by such means, we shall avoid
many fights which might have arisen out of the
vain notions of prestige, dignity, and national
self-sufficiency. But once means have been
found for the destruction of the machinery of
war, the worst danger of war will have been got
rid of : and then the practice we shall have had
in settling disputes peacefully will be of the
greatest service to us.

When the armies and the navies of the world
are disbanded there will be a condition of
affairs which it is highly necessary to consider.
In all nations entitled to rank as world-powers
there is an enormous military class. When the
armies go home for the last time, and magazine
rifles and machine guns become museum
objects and nothing more ; when it is no longer
conceived to be the greatest service a man can
render to his country to organise clubs wherein
men may inexpensively learn how to shoot, so
as to be able to kill each other with a credit-
able precision when the chance comes ; then
there will arise the problem of how to employ
these disbanded drones : and to some this

224 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

problem has appeared to present acute diffi-
culties on account of the labour-problem in-
volved.

But to apprehend anything beyond the most
transient embarrassments from this cause is
surely to misconceive the whole subject of
economics. The men at present withdrawn
from productive labour by employment, either
transiently (as in countries where conscription
is used), or more or less permanently (as in
England), have to be fed, clothed and housed
in any event ; and they can only be thus sup-
plied with the commodities of life by the labour
of other men. What the term of their military
service happens to be is immaterial to the
subject. Whether there are standing armies
and navies with long or short service, and a
reserve ; or armies and navies served for three
years by successive drafts ; the amount of
labour withdrawn in any community is at any
one period the same in that community. The
return to civil life of the volunteer armies
employed in the United States during the
Civil War and the war of the deliverance of
Cuba did not produce troublesome economic
conditions ; and only those persons who think
that a society is enriched by the circulation of
money spent in wasteful expenditure like the
fireworks and banquets consumed in celebrat-
ing an event like the visit of a foreign potentate,
or commemorating more or less irrelevantly the

LABOUR QUESTIONS 225

failure of " Gunpowder treason and plot," can
imagine that a nation would be impoverished
by the vast accession to its productive power
yielded by the abolition of armaments.
Similarly, to think that the suppression of
Woolwich arsenal and the closing of Krupp's
gun factory would be an industrial calamity
instead of an enormous saving of national
money, is to adopt the uninstructed view of
politics which conceives of governments as
self-supported and self-created institutions
whose expenditure is a gift to the people ;
instead of as being organisations paid by the
people out of earnings which would otherwise
be enjoyed by themselves. This sort of con-
ception, fatuous as it appears when once
reduced to logical terms, is common enough.
Whenever any object of popular desire appears
inaccessible we are always being told that the
Government ought to provide it — as if Govern-
ment were a sort of deity capable of producing
wealth from somewhere outside the world.
But such notions have only to be for a moment
examined in order that their fallacy may
become manifest and palpable ; and it is
equally easy to see that the wealth-producing
power of the men composing armies would be a
direct gift to the community of the world if
armies were abolished, and that the moneys
formerly, but no longer, expended upon their
accoutrements, weapons and sustenance would
p

226 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

be so much waste obviated. Here will, in fact,
be one of the many economies of a hundred
years hence.

It will be convenient to digress, in passing,
in order to notice one very curious contention
sometimes rather fancifully introduced into
discussions on the subject of universal peace.

It is stated that war is an inevitable feature
of national life, and that it exercises a beneficent
effect upon national character — that it fosters
manliness and a respect for the virile attributes
of courage, steadfastness and self-respect ; that
nations which have abandoned the art of war
sink into effeminacy, slothfulness and destruc-
tive luxury ; and that the peace of the nations,
if it ever comes, will be associated with a
terrible deterioration of the race. As to the
notion that anything can prevent the abolition
of armed conflict as a means of settling the
differences of peoples, we may very well be
satisfied to await the issue. No one who
recognises the steady growth of humanitarian
feeling ; no one who remembers, even to
deplore, our growing sentimentalism ; no one
who has insight enough to perceive that
progress, at an ever-increasing speed, must
inevitably be accompanied by advanced in-
tellectuality, increased self-restraint and greater
wisdom, can doubt that a process so illogical,
barbarous and brutalising as battle must be
banished, as well by the new humanity as by

WAR SHALL CEASE 227

the economic necessities of our race. But the
notion of deploring, on moral grounds, the
assured coming of a reform so salutary, calls
for more strenuous reprobation. One would
have thought it evident, from the popular
effect of the war in South Africa, that, so far
from being a matter for self-congratulation,
this highly necessary war was a terrible lesson
in the brutalising effect of armed conflict, not
alone on the men actually engaged, but also on
the people who remained at home. Indeed,
since it is only a comparatively small fraction
of a community that can ever be personally
active in military operations, the effect on the
home-stayers is evidently what the upholders
of war as a civilising influence must be thinking
of. It would be ridiculous, and it is quite un-
necessary to the argument, to deny the fine
qualities of determination, of fortitude before
national disaster, and of calm confidence in the
prowess of the nation's arms which, in the
bulk of the English people, the Transvaal war
called forth. It would be just as idle to
deny the sublime exhibition of patriotism and
self-abnegation which, on one side at least,
was provoked by the Russo-Japanese war.
But it would also be foolish not to recognise
the quite evident brutalisation which has
followed our war in South Africa, the remark-
able increase in crimes of murderous violence,
and especially of double crimes — murder and

228 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

suicide — which has lately occurred. The true
source of these increased evils is the reflex
effect of familiarity (either at first hand, or more
remotely through newspaper reading and
through the personal narrative of returned
soldiers) with the notion of violent slaying, and
the diminished sense of the sanctity of human
life which accompanies the spectacle of man-
slaying by wholesale held up to popular
admiration, and indeed necessitated and
justified by the conditions of war and the duty
of patriotism. No doubt it is true (as has
been finely said) that there is one thing which
is worse for a nation than war, and that is
that a nation should be so afraid of war as to
submit to aggression rather than fight in defence
of its rights. But to subscribe to this doctrine,
which no rational thinker will dispute, is a very
different thing from agreeing that the nations
would be otherwise than strengthened and
civilised by the universal abandonment of
battle. Probably we are as yet some decades
from the time when we shall have sufficient
nobility of sentiment to be entirely agreed,
without a single dissentient, in recognising the
enormous service to national and international
morality which Mr Gladstone rendered when
he had the courage to withdraw from the
conflict with the Boers after Majuba. It will
be long before we are logical enough to see
that the fact of this magnanimity having been

WAR SHALL CEASE 229

basely abused does not in the least detract from
its moral weight and moral beneficence. But
the influence of such an act cannot be without
effect upon progress. It is by such acts, and
the possibility of their glad acceptance by
nations of sufficient moral elevation to perform
them, that war will be banished.

In the meantime, while noble virtues can be
displayed by nations in time of combat, and by
civilians as well as soldiers, it is a new doctrine
that we are asked to accept when we are told
that there is anything individually elevating to
the character in sitting at home while someone
else goes out and fights for that home's
protection. One of the least satisfactory
features of public interest in games of manly
endeavour and endurance, games of danger
and violent effort, like football and cricket, is
that of the very greatly increased numbers who
"follow" these games and watch the fortunes
of selected teams in the Cup contests only a
very small proportion play the games them-
selves. Thousands of young men hardly see a
football match from September to April,
though they keenly follow the admirable
descriptions of them in their sporting papers.
It is taking a very short-sighted view to
applaud the growing interest in athletics,
which, just now, we show, as a sign of our
manliness. Not very much endurance is
required in order to bet on the success of

230 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

a favourite team : and to assist, as a con-
tributor to gate-moneys, in paying selected
athletes to endure risk and violent fatigue in a
game which one does not play for oneself is
exactly on a level with applauding the exploits
of an army to which one contributes nothing
but taxes.

Moreover, this beneficent effect of actual
war-in-progress could only exercise itself dur-
ing limited and distressful periods. No nation
is able to be seriously at war, in modern con-
ditions, for very long, and great periods of
recuperation must intervene between war and
war ; the combatant nations being meanwhile
subject to aggressions from keepers of the
peace, because they are not in a position to
fight again with a fresh and an unexhausted
adversary. Consequently, any beneficent
effect must be expected to be exercised chiefly
in time of peace. And, in practice, it does not
seem to be the case that nations in which the
military standard is high and the military
class is exalted above the civil class, show
always in any remarkable manner the virtues
supposed to be fostered by the manly art of
war. No one would contend that the average
German is more self-reliant and self-respecting,
quicker to decide on action in a moment of
stress, braver, manlier, more enduring of re-
verses of fortune, than the average American.
Yet Germany, where military officers are held

SOCIAL FRUGALITY 231

in such esteem that they can behave with
unrestrained arrogance and brutality towards
civilians in public places without provoking
any signs of popular indignation, unless when
their acts are commented upon in the socialist
newspapers; and can even inflict disgusting and
degrading indignities upon private soldiers
without being officially punished, except where
they have carried brutality to the limit (and
they are punished with the greatest tenderness
even then) : Germany, I say, ought to show
the virtues of a military state at their best.
Whereas in America, where there is practically
no standing army, and where military titles,
the residue of wars conducted almost entirely
by volunteer and amateur soldiers, are so
common that the very holders of them treat
these titles as subjects of humorous deprecia-
tion, the people are conspicuous for manliness,
for high endurance, for patience under the re-
verses of fortune, for temperance : and in the
average of physical courage America far excels
any military nation. There seems to be no
reason at all for apprehending that the obsoles-
cence of militarism will have a deleterious effect
on the manhood of the race : while there are in-
contestable evidences that it will greatly foster
the equally important virtues of gentleness,
humanity, and respect for the weak. Thus,
while, for reasons of sentiment and common
sense, war is certain to become obsolete before

232 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

the end of this century, we shall find in the
release of the funds and of the labour hitherto
employed in the organisation of war one of the
greatest economies of an age which in all things
will be thrifty : and there is no reason at all to
apprehend difficulty in providing for the warrior
who finds his occupation gone, when we have
so reorganised (as we must reorganise) our
social system, that no man will live in ex-
cessive luxury on the labour of his fellows, but
that all will be contributors to a common
frugality.

CHAPTER XI

THE LAW A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

USING the figurative words, "the law," in
their widest possible sense, to mean the entire
system which governs the relations of the
individuals in a community with each other
and with the community at large, we can easily
see that in a. century's time many changes of
law will have taken place. If it be true that
legislative restraints are mostly necessitated by
the ill-conceived energies of mankind, and that
the right function of the law is to assure to
each citizen the largest possible liberty that is
consistent with the equal liberty of every other
citizen and of all, then it will be right to believe
that the great extension of general intelligence,
and the equally great extension of general
morality, anticipated for the next century, will
render many forms of existing restraint obsolete
because unnecessary. Regarding offences both
against the person and against property as
manifestations, for the most part, of unintelli-
gence, we may expect that increased intelli-
gence will lead to a diminution of their number.

233

234 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

In applying statistics to an examination of the
question whether and to what extent improve-
ments in the general standard of education
have in the past diminished crime, and conse-
quently how far crime is likely to be still further
diminished in the future, we must be careful to
keep in sight two considerations — first, that an
increased vigilance and elaboration on the part
of authority may easily make it appear that
crime has failed to diminish under educational
influences, when it is only the detection and
punishment of crime that have been rendered
more perfect ; and second, that if one kind of
education have not had all the salutary effects
expected of it, it does not follow that a different
kind will not have all this expected efficacy and
more. Manifestly, legislation against crimes
formerly outside the reach of the law — that
creation of "new offences" which one hears
rather foolishly objected to — will increase
statistics of crime, if we compute crime in terms
of prison-admissions ; and the fact that such
increase, due entirely to legislation, has taken
place concurrently with some other reform,
such as the improvement of education,
obviously does not entitle us to connect the
increase with the reform. The latter may
even be operating in exactly the opposite
manner, despite the statistics. A number of
new offences were created, for instance, by
what is called in England the Criminal Law

EDUCATION AND CRIME 235

Amendment Act, and it would be easy for a
shocked observer of prison statistics to observe,
in a period of years during which the administra-
tion of that useful act was being perfected,
dreadful increases in the crimes which it
represses ; whereas the fact probably is that
crime of this sort has diminished, largely
through the action of the very causes which
would make it appear to have been increasing.
Therefore, if anyone still argues that education
as a means of diminishing crime has proved a
failure, it is not upon judicial statistics that he
must base his contentions. Probably that argu-
ment is obsolete : but if it were not, and if it
were allowed all the validity of which it is
capable, it would still furnish no ground what-
ever from which to throw doubt upon the
expectation that in a hundred years' time crime
will have diminished very greatly, as a result
of the improved education of the new era.
For indeed, as education is at present con-
ducted, it would be rather a remarkable thing
that it should have any effect upon criminality
at all. What influence increased intelligence
may have in restraining one part of the popula-
tion from the desire to commit crime might
easily be neutralised by the effect, on another
portion, of the increased craft and subtlety
imparted by education. Knowledge can
facilitate crime as well as deter from it. A
man who has not learned to write, it has been

236 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

shrewdly remarked, will not commit forgery :
but that is not a reason for thinking that a
knowledge of writing tends to promote crimi-
nality. The man who, being (perhaps unduly)
proficient in it, becomes a forger, would not
necessarily have remained blameless if he had
continued illiterate. He would very probably
have been a thief, which does not require pen-
manship : but on the other hand, the increased
facility of obtaining employment when one can
write might just as easily have saved him from
some temptations to dishonesty. It is not very
rational to expect a great moral effect upon
character from the mere acquisition of
knowledge. But from the moment we con-
ceive that means and methods of education in
the future will be valued in proportion to their
influence in developing character, and especi-
ally intelligent self-control, it is impossible to
doubt that the new teaching will be among the
most potent of moral influences. One benefit
derived from this will be the possibility of
abandoning legislative restrictions whose effect
is inimical to self-control and to intelligent
self-protection. It will no longer be necessary
to protect the people by law from the conse-
quences of their own foolishness, and we shall
have learned that it is much better for the
public to be encouraged to safeguard its own
interests than to be relieved of the necessity
to do so.

SELF-RESTRAINT 237

Anticipating, therefore, that many existing
forms of restraint will have become obsolete
because unnecessary, we may very fairly ask
ourselves whether, in an improved moral and
intellectual atmosphere, it will not have been
found advisable to abolish other restraints and
requisitions as a directly remedial measure.
The suggestion may, at the moment, appear
chimerical, but so must every intelligent antici-
pation of a coming time appear to anyone who
approaches the subject without allowing for the
difference of conditions, and conceives of
changes which will take place so gradually as
to be almost unperceived, as if they were to
occur per saltum, without any process of slow
moral preparation. So would nearly every
social condition of the present age have ap-
peared individually to a citizen of the world
of 1800, if, possessing intelligence to foresee
it, he lacked the imagination necessary to
foresee the accompanying and subservient con-
ditions. That public opinion should be so
shocked by the execution of capital punishment,
that only the most atrocious murders are thus
punished — the sentence, where there is any
real extenuation at all, being habitually com-
muted nowadays — is a condition which would
hardly have suggested itself even to the most
alert imaginations in an age where small thefts
were constantly punished by death. Our sense
of what may be called the accidental influences

238 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

of punitive measures is even yet so little de-
veloped that only a small minority of the
public at the present day is able to perceive
that the deterrent effect of flogging, as a
punishment for violent robbery, is dearly pur-
chased at the expense of the brutalising relish
with which sentences of flogging are welcomed
by the public, and even on the judicial bench,
where expressions of regret that the same
penalty cannot be inflicted for other crimes are
still common. Yet it would seem obvious
enough that the sanction given to acts of
violence by the deliberate adoption of hanging
and flogging by the law, which is supposed to
be the exemplar of public morality, must tend
nearly as much to perpetuate crimes of violence
as fear of these chastisements to deter. In
attempting to foresee the spirit of legislation in
the future it is absolutely necessary to foresee
concurrently the spirit of the communities by
which the legislation will be adopted. Antici-
pating, as we cannot fail to anticipate, a
sedulous care for moral effects in education, we
must anticipate an equal care in legislation. It
would be unworthy of the supremely logical
age which assuredly is coming, to use all
possible measures in the schoolroom to foster
in childhood self-reliance and intelligent self-
protection, while continuing by "grand-
motherly" government of the people to remove
as often as possible any need for self-reliance

NEW LAWS 239

in the adult. The advantages attending little
bits of protective law-making often blind us to
their ill-effects. It is no doubt very useful to
provide, as we do provide, that condensed milk,
when deprived of its full proportion of cream,
shall only be sold in packages notifying that
deprivation. If we did not do this children
would be starved by their parents' ignorance.
But the necessity for this enactment is at least
in part created by the existence of a host of
similar laws, the aggregate effect of which is to
give a general impression that anything sold as
food is good and useful unless it bears some
warning to the contrary ; and meantime every
evasion of commercial morality which does not
come under legislative restraint is naturally
held to be perfectly justifiable — not at all a
good thing for commercial morality. Now it
would be a highly perilous measure to abolish,
at a stroke, all protective legislation against
adulterated or impoverished foods. We have
built up a social condition in which every man
thinks himself entitled to be protected against
such frauds. But in a community which has
been taught to take care of itself, and protect
itself against frauds by its own intelligence,
such protections would be retrograde and in-
jurious. The aim of legislatures in the next
century will be to foster all kinds of self-
reliance. They will perceive that even the
high importance of a reform which can be more

240 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

or less easily enforced by law does not com-
pensate for the bad effect of thus enforcing it,
if it could be maintained by the spontaneous
vigilance of a wisely-nurtured public ; and the
degrading effect of superfluous law will be
more dreaded than the temporary dangers
against which the law might protect the
citizens.

Nevertheless, it is inevitable that, during a
period more or less extended, material progress
will be accompanied by numerous legal enact-
ments such as a perfect state would dispense
with, and possibly the end of all of them will
not have been reached even in a century's
time. How invention tends to promote legisla-
tion has recently been noticeable in the new
laws affecting automobile traffic on roads. In
a perfect state it would doubtless be unnecessary
to provide legal machinery to compel the
owners of powerful and rapid vehicles to re-
spect the rights of their fellow-citizens and to
abstain from running away without identifying
themselves when they had caused an accident.
In proportion as the moral condition of the
next century approximates to perfection, such
ordinances as the motor-car laws will be un-
necessary. But for a long time new laws will
always be coming into necessity as a result
of new inventions. For instance, when, as
was suggested in an earlier chapter, business
is carried on largely through the medium

NEW LAWS 241

of recording telephones, wirelessly actuated,
special laws will have to be devised to protect
trade against the various kinds of fraud which
this method of transaction would otherwise
facilitate, and some methods will have to be
devised for giving legal force to arrangements
made by telephony, akin to the methods which
now give legal force to written contracts.
Similarly, various by-laws will have to be
enacted to protect the public against the
accidents incidental to the various methods of
rapid transit that will have come into use.
Probably it will no longer be necessary, and it
will have been perceived to be injurious, to
protect travellers against their own rashness.

It is a well-known phenomenon that periods
of material prosperity and high wages are
fruitful in crime. Probably increased con-
sumption of alcohol in prosperous times is the
sole cause of this. There can be no direct
connection between wealth and criminality ;
the bulk of the criminal population is, on the
contrary, poor. It would be idle to speculate
as to whether the next century will or will not
continue to legislate against intoxicants, because
it is morally certain that intoxicants will have
been legislated out of existence already, with-
out waiting for the period when it would no
longer be necessary to abolish them forcibly.
For at present, and in the more immediate
future, there is no ground whatever for antici-
Q

242 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

pating that the legislative hand will be with-
held wherever law-making appears the simplest
and most obvious method of getting rid of any
crying evil : and there can be no doubt that
the abuse of alcohol is an evil of precisely the
sort that legislature will be active in suppressing.
Some changes in the method of government
will have to take place before Parliament can
legislate against alcohol : but that it will so
legislate before the middle of this century is
morally certain. In what country the alcohol
law is first likely to be passed is immaterial.
Every country which adopts it will thereby
assist in forcing the same measure upon other
countries, because, with international travel
constantly becoming cheaper and more easy,
it is certain that numerous people who object
to being deprived of stimulants and intoxicants
in one country will migrate to others where
their appetite can have full play, and will
intensify the drink problem in those countries
until these, too, are forced, or will think them-
selves forced, to legislate in self-protection.
Thus such laws will become universal. No
doubt this condition will be reached gradually,
measures of restriction preceding measures
of prohibition. But the end will be the
same, and it will be forced upon the world as
much by the increased evils inflicted by
alcohol on nerves increasingly susceptible to
its influence, as by any other consideration.

THE DRUNKARD 243

Anyone who has taken the trouble to observe

the nervous and physical condition of men and

women in the average, during even so short a

period as the last quarter of a century, must

have been impressed by the marked increase

of neurotic states, not merely in exceptional

individuals, but in all the people. The neurotic

temperament is much more adversely affected

by alcohol than any other ; and we are all

growing more neurotic. All the conditions

of modern life tend that way : and it is not

alcohol alone that will have to go, but all

sorts of habit-inducing drugs, such as morphine,

cocaine, and the rest, all of which, like alcohol

itself, will soon be so restricted in regard

to their sale that their abuse will be rendered

practically impossible, and their use restricted

to a purely medical employment. It is even

quite possible, and I have already ventured

to predict,1 that when the progress of neurotism

has worked itself out, even such mild exhilar-

ants as tea and coffee will have to be made the

subjects of legal restriction. There exist many

individuals at the present moment upon whom

coffee acts as a stimulant nearly as powerful

as alcohol, moderately employed, upon the

rest of us — that is to say, they experience the

same mild exhilaration after a cup of strong

coffee as a moderate man does after a glass

of burgundy or a whisky-and-soda. These

1 Ante, Chapter II.

244 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

effects are no more injurious, at present, than
those of a moderate use of wine or spirits : but
they can become perilous, and may develop in
all sorts of ways, when the nervous organisa-
tion becomes more delicate. Thus, the abolition
of alcoholic beverages, at present the fad of a
minority not always very respectable in the
methods of its propaganda, will presently be
an indispensable feature of social progress.

Unless all criminologists are wrong in their
deductions, something like fifty per cent, of all
crime will be got rid of when alcohol no longer
exists to cause crime. There are further
ameliorative influences certain to be at work
which will tend to reduce the sorts of crime
chiefly troublesome at present. Adopting the
familiar division of crime into (a) offences
against the person and (6) offences against
property, it is very easy to see that what may
be called private crime (as distinguished from
crime against the body politic) will diminish
automatically. When the extremes of wealth
and poverty have become as much less marked
as I have endeavoured to show that they must
become, it is evident that the temptation to
offences of greed will be greatly diminished.
A large proportion of all these crimes arises
out of poverty alone, or out of poverty coupled
with stupidity. A man who has not enough
intelligence to earn is very likely to steal in
order to provide for himself; and one who is

POVERTY AND CRIME 245

equipped by the knowledge of a trade is
consequently not so liable to be dishonest as
one who is less hopefully situated. He is also
likely to be more intelligent, and consequently
better qualified to perceive that the balance of
comfort is on the side of the honest worker and
not on the side of the burglar or thief. Any-
one who has had occasion to observe the
proceedings of criminal courts must have
noticed the frequency with which the descrip-
tion " labourer" is adopted by the offenders
charged. "Labourer" means an unskilled
worker — a man who has learned no trade, and
brings nothing to his work but thews and
sinews. It is much less common to find a
trade claimed : one rarely sees a thief or
burglar described on the charge sheet as
"John Doe, carpenter," or "Richard Roe,
gas-fitter." They do not even profess to
have a trade. Of course where a man's
business is such as to lend itself to criminal
pursuits, the case is different : one finds bank-
note forgers described as "engravers" and
"lithographers," and makers of counterfeit
money as "die sinkers." But in the average
of crime — at least crime of the more stupid
sorts — it is the tradeless man who is nearly
always charged. It is impossible to resist the
inference that poverty is a determining cause
in most crimes of greed. In a hundred years'
time the spread of technical education will

246 A HUNDRED YEARS HEXCE

have thinned the ranks of the unskilled. At
the same time the inducements to honesty and
steady industry will have been enormously in-
creased through the universality of the profit-
sharing system ; and the position of the steady
worker will have become so greatly more
attractive than that of the casual thief, that
only the utmost stupidity can tempt anyone
to the latter's course of life. Self-respecting
labour for a share in the profits of labour,
instead of mechanical toil for wages that do
not bear any relation to profits nor to any-
thing else except the fluctuations of the labour-
market, will so elevate the average of in-
dustrial character that it will be rare for
workmen to drift into crime. At the same
time, and similarly, the restraint placed upon
undue accumulation of wealth will diminish
temptation to crimes of greed at the other
extremity of social life. It will no longer
be worth anyone's while to organise cole
schemes of dishonest company - promoting.
Thus, crimes against property are certain to
become relatively infrequent, because the
greatest temptations to them will have been
removed.

Apart from the largely preponderating
number of cases in which offences against the
person — assaults and the like — arise now out
of intoxication, the tendency to crimes of
violence will also diminish as the temper of

CRIMES OF VIOLENCE 247

society grows milder. An age so much
advanced in sentimentality as to revolt against
the cruelty of breeding horses for traction and
cattle for food is not likely to be fruitful in
offences of violence. These offences, where
associated neither with drink nor robbery, prob-
ably arise more often from jealousy between
the sexes than anything else. It is unfortun-
ately impossible to suggest that sexual jealousy
can be wholly eliminated from human nature.
But no doubt its violent exhibition will have
been educated out of us to a large measure.
Other personal offences, as rape, criminal
assault and various criminal vices will doubtless
diminish in frequency as a consequence of
general moral improvement. In short, the
work of the policeman will be greatly eased in
the course of this century, and no doubt many
functions at present relegated to the police,
such as the direction of street traffic, the care
of vagrant dogs, and the like, will be performed
by officials of a different character. Even
these duties will be far less onerous than they
now are, when we have become intelligent
enough to see that the best way for every man
to secure his own freedom and comfort is to re-
spect the freedom and the rights of others.

It remains an open question whether at some
time during this century it may not be tempor-
arily needful for the State to undertake the
restraint of offences against the intellect, such

248 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

as the publication of false or grossly exagger-
ated news, and of matter calculated to encourage
vice, as betting. No doubt the balance of
advantage is in favour of the entire freedom of
the Press ; but it cannot be denied that this
freedom is at present greatly abused. It would
be easy to name a dozen types of periodicals
whose forcible suppression would be an
enormous gain to the public ; and in an age so
increasingly prone to look to the governing
body for assistance in every conceivable matter
no one can deny the probability of some legis-
lative steps being taken, when the public first
begins to concern itself seriously with public
morals. But this possibility is much nearer at
hand than the end of this century ; at the latter
period public opinion will probably be well
able to take care of itself, and any laws of the
kind I have suggested will, like numerous
other forms of legislation, including many now
operative, have fallen into desuetude because
there will be no temptation to the misde-
meanours they are, or may be, framed to
repress.

The question of the form which the repres-
sion of crime will take a hundred years hence
can only be answered if we first endeavour to
see what the developments of penology, or the
science of punishment, are likely to be during
the next hundred years. Naturally, they will
have the same tendencies as the society which

PENOLOGY 249

produces them. We may safely anticipate that
the more savage punishments, as death, flog-
ging and painful labour will be eliminated,
together with all punishments that are not
believed to be reformatory in their character.
And even the relatively mild penalty of long
imprisonment may to the gentler mind of a
new age appear unduly vindictive.

Punishment will be regarded as a diminish-
ingly necessary evil ; and our " object all
sublime " will not be to make it fit the par-
ticular crime for which it is awarded, but to
make it diminish crime as a whole. Punition
as a moral force will be judged according to its
effect in two different directions, namely, its
force as a means of reforming the convicted
individual by preventing his relapse into crime,
and its force as a means of deterring other
persons from committing the same crimes at
all ; and of these two the second will be con-
sidered greatly the more important in an age
that will be logical as well as mild ; because it
is obviously a greater object to produce an
effect upon the minds of a possibly great
number than to produce it upon the mind of
one culprit. Consequently, although a bene-
volent solicitude for the reformation of the
detected offender will not be excluded from the
consideration of future penologists, the deter-
ring from crime of the tempted classes will be
much more demanded. As to this, it cannot

250 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

be questioned that improvements in detection
and in legal procedure (eliminating the chances
of escape for the guilty without endangering
the freedom of the innocent) are capable of
accomplishing a great deal more than could
possibly be looked for from any alteration in
the nature of the punishment used. Experience
shows that hitherto a ferocious punishment not
very certainly applied does not deter anything
like so much as comparatively mild punishment
with very little chance of escape. Coining, for
instance, is less common now than when coiners
were slowly pressed to death under weights, if
detected; and the diminution of this crime has
not been due to fear of the punishment now
long abandoned ; neither was that penalty re-
moved from our system of criminal law because
it had done its work and stamped out counter-
feiting. On the contrary, improvements in the
minting of real money, by rendering the detec-
tion of counterfeits easy, may be said to have
almost eliminated the offence in question, and
this result is all the more remarkable when we
remember that, owing to the appreciation of
gold, real silver shillings, half-crowns and other
pieces just as good in assay as the royal
mintage could be coined by counterfeiters at a
handsome profit.

Our very proper anxiety to avoid every
possible chance of committing and punishing
the innocent doubtless enables many guilty

CERTAIN PUNISHMENT 251

persons to escape every year ; and probably
quite half the prisoners acquitted at every
assize are really guilty in some degree. The
jurisprudence of a hundred years hence will
certainly have been so much improved that
innocent persons will rarely be accused at all,
and that guilty ones will not be able to escape
on technical grounds : and with improved
detective methods the chances of escape in any
given case will be greatly diminished. What
punishments are inflicted will be of a re-
formatory character, and no doubt provisional
release, freed from the many crying scandals of
the ticket-of-leave system, will play a great
part in scientific penology. Recidivism will, of
course, be the subject of much sharper punish-
ment. In the meantime, the study of mental
science in its relation to crime will have made
great strides, and if the views of our own age
in regard to heredity should be maintained, a
very great source of crime will probably be got
rid of altogether, because men and women with
just that mental twist which leads to crime will,
by one device or another, be absolutely pre-
vented from propagating their race.1

1 Against some methods of securing this object no doubt
the unintelligent sentimentality of the present time would
rebel ; but if any inconsistency be detected in my suggestion
that the next century, which is expected to be even milder
than this, will accept them, it only needs to be replied that
the gentleness of our descendants will be a reasonable and
ordered gentleness, not a mere effect of morbid sentiment-

252 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

It is impossible to work out here the various
methods of individual reform applicable to
convicts of various sorts, because the nature of
these methods must necessarily depend, to a
great extent, upon the conditions of a society
of which only the most salient and extreme
peculiarities can be foreseen even by the most
imaginative. But all evidence seems to
suggest that actual crime will have become
much diminished in amount, while the necessity
for dealing with what may be called technical
crimes — misdemeanours, and offences against
regulations made for the convenience of society
rather than for the defence of life and morals —
will probably have been reduced to a minimum,
partly by the intelligence of the population, and
partly through the fact that the minor offences
will have ceased to be dealt with by law, and
will be sufficiently repressed by natural causes.
Not only, therefore, will the amount of
necessary restraint become less, through the
diminution of crime and of temptation to crime,
but the employment of legal restraint will be
less demanded, the latter being recognised as,
when avoidable, dangerous to public morals.

ality. They will not hesitate before an apparent and
temporary cruelty which is capable of preventing much
greater suffering in a much greater number of persons.
The crime of permitting children to be born with brains
abnormally predisposed to evil of any sort will more greatly
revolt an intelligent age than any conceivable measure
adopted for its prevention.

ELEEMOSYNARY JUSTICE 253

And, while criminal law will be less active, civil
litigation will also probably be much less heavy.
The same causes which will tend to make
us more careful to avoid committing offences
against the common right of others, will make
us more scrupulous to perform contracts. And
as a consequence of the improved morality
which there seems every reason to anticipate,
a hundred years hence, it will no doubt have
become possible to execute a reform which
many thinkers have desiderated as an element
of perfected polity. It is hardly necessary
here to recapitulate the arguments in favour of
the contention that the cost of civil suits
should be borne, as the cost of criminal prose-
cutions is always supposed to be borne, by the
State. That the man who brings successfully
an action at law, or successfully defends one,
should be able to do so only at an expense to
himself, is against public policy : and there are
even now numerous cases every year in which
even the unsuccessful party in a lawsuit is
really doing the public a service. In a perfect
state of public morality he would always be
doing so : and in a hundred years' time he will
certainly be more often worthy of public thanks
than he is now — he will be less often seeking
to impose or defend a wrong. As matters
stand, it is notorious that the grant of costs
following the judgment in a civil suit is only a
partial relief to the successful suitor. He has

254 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

to pay his solicitor more than his solicitor can
obtain leave from the taxing master to collect
from the other side ; while if (as not infre-
quently happens) the other side cannot pay,
the costs awarded by the Court have to be
borne by the winner of the suit. It is a
frequent reply of dishonest defendants, when
threatened with legal proceedings, that they
" will meet the plaintiff in the Bankruptcy
Court." On the other hand, a man will often
submit to oppression rather than be subjected
to the expense of even a successful defence.
Every litigant who maintains his right, whether
as plaintiff or defendant, renders very much
the same service to the public which we often
hear applauded on the part of persons who
" come forward to prosecute " in criminal or
misdemeanour cases. He is assisting to make
probity profitable and evasion dangerous ; in
other words, he is subserving public morality
and helping to repress dishonesty. It would
be much to the public advantage that his costs
should be borne by the public purse, and borne
generously, every expense legitimately incurred
being allowed him. Logically, he ought also
to receive a sufficient, and even a fairly liberal,
solatium for his trouble and loss of time : and
an honest loser ought to be able to receive a
certificate from the court entitling him to the
same amenities, the withholding of which would
constitute a deterrent penalty against factious

ELEEMOSYNARY JUSTICE 255

litigation. But it may be urged on practical
grounds that to make the path of the litigant
too easy would lead to too much invocation of
the law, and that the full recognition of the
public usefulness of litigants must be postponed
to the millennium — which age of ideal perfec-
tion will not occur (it may be thought necessary
to concede) a hundred years hence. And it is
not difficult to imagine means by which the
public can be protected against the factious
and unnecessary litigation to which, in the
absence of some safeguard, we should certainly
be exposed. The plaintiff might be required
to obtain some sort of fiat, such as is required
now before a suit of criminal libel can be
prosecuted : and there would be no hardship
in the litigant who failed to obtain the fiat
being left to bear his own expenses up to the
time of failure, though, in the event of his
success, he would of course have them repaid.
The legal machinery for obtaining permission
to sue need not be made too complicated : it
must not be allowed to develop into a sort of
preliminary trial. Probably some sort of
arrangement as the above will be instituted a
hundred years hence, and all law-costs borne
by the State, except in the case of obvious
dishonesty or bad faith ; the trouble and loss of
time necessarily incurred exercising a restrain-
ing influence upon the litigious.

In regard to the general machinery of the

256 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

law it would be tedious to attempt to foresee
all the reforms of which the growing complexity
of human affairs will certainly impose the
necessity upon us. The clumsiness of a system
by which important civil cases have to be tried
three times, in ways differing in detail, before
a final decision is reached, needs no insisting
upon : and there is a manifest inconsistency in
the fact that an action about a matter worth
£101 can be twice appealed, while a man tried
for his life, or something even more important
than life, has no appeal at all against an
adverse verdict, except to a secret tribunal of
Civil Service clerks — for in the u commutation "
of sentences the Crown stands for the Home
Secretary, and the Home Secretary is neces-
sarily obliged to depend upon his assistants,
who in their turn may very possibly have to
derive their information from officials whose
credit would be damaged if some fact favour-
able to the prisoner came out. To admit this
inconsistency is not by any means equivalent
to admitting the necessity for courts of criminal
appeal : and anyone who knows the methods
of criminal jurisprudence in the United States
must recognise that such courts are capable of
abuse highly dangerous to public morality, so
dependent upon respect for law. But with the
great increase in scrupulosity and in the mild-
ness of public temper which the tendencies of
human development clearly vaticinate for the

CRIMINAL APPEALS, A.D. 2000 257

next century, it seems impossible to doubt that
some method will be adopted by which criminal
trials can be reviewed, even though the class
of cases in which the necessity for review is
most often mentioned now will no doubt have
disappeared with the abolition of capital
punishment. And it does not seem likely to
be beyond the ingenuity of the coming time to
discover some means by which civil cases can
be settled in one trial, instead of requiring
three, without danger to the justice of any
individual suit.

It is sometimes questioned whether trial by
jury will continue a feature of modern civilisa-
tion. The remark of a legal cynic that " the
man with a good case is always safe with a
judge, while the man with a bad case has always
a chance with a jury," is sufficiently sound
to make it a question whether juries are worth
the trouble given to the members of them, and
the vast amount of additional labour which
their employment inflicts on the courts of which
they are a feature. The conditions which
make trial by jury " the blest palladium of our
liberties" have passed away in civilised
countries, and to a great extent in Ireland. It
is no doubt characteristic of the British people
that we should so long as this have retained
the use of juries in civil suits, though even
here there are many cases (especially in
divorce and libel) where the average common
R

258 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

sense of a jury is really helpful to the judge,
and constitutes a check upon his prejudice or
impatience. There was a time when the jury
was a genuine safeguard against oppression in
private as well as Crown cases, and it is like
us, as a nation, to have retained them when
their usefulness in this respect was happily
obsolete. But it seems to the writer pretty
certain that in civil trials juries will have been
dispensed with long before the end of thi
century, and this dispensation will probably b*
the stepping-stone to a system whereby
criminal causes will be tried by a bench of
judges, instead of by a judge and jury. The
whole tendency of modern conditions (in which
must be included our growing, and highly dis-
creditable, individual impatience of the trouble
of jury-service) seems to point to this.1

Reforms of judicial procedure of course

1 It may, perhaps, be thought that the disuse of trial by
jury would be liable to perpetuate a somewhat glaring
abuse of our present jurisprudence — the disproportionately
severe repression of offences against property as compared
with the disproportionately light repression of offences
against the person. But the mere fact that the "un-
learned " bench is conspicuously inept in this particular is
no reason for thinking that "learned" courts would be so :
and meantime, as judges, like other men, are children of
their epoch, we may suppose that the increased mildness
of the new age will be reflected here as elsewhere, and that
extenuating circumstances will be allowed more weight in
determining a sentence for larceny, and less weight in
determining a sentence for assault.

LEGISLATION, A.D. 2000 259

constitute only a relatively small part of the
legislative work which will have been accom-
plished by the end of the century. Apart from
the work of gradually remodelling the law
with the idea (which nowhere seems to suggest
itself to present-day legislators) of making it
act beneficially upon public character, there
will no doubt be a vast amount of work for
the various parliaments of the world in codify-
ing existing statute- and common-law systems,
which in all communities have fallen into
complexity and confusion of a degree which
makes them highly unsatisfactory instruments
of social protection : and there will also be
a great amount of constructive legislation,
particularly in regard to the tenure of land, to
the simplification of conveyancing, to a more
intelligent machinery of contracts, to the
equitable handling of such accidental or condi-
tional sources of wealth as we call " unearned
increment " and the discovery of unexpected
minerals, to the useful limitation of inheritance,
and to other matters too numerous to be safely
named. And in order that these great works
may be accomplished, it is quite certain that,
not only in England, but in all those States
where really free parliaments exist, great re-
forms will have been found necessary, and will
have become so much a part of the machinery
of legislation and administration a hundred
years hence, that our descendants will hardly

260 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

be able to realise how Government was
ever carried on without them. Indeed, it is by
the difficulty of administering anything at all
by parliamentary methods — every year more
evidently breaking down — rather than by the
desire to undertake large schemes of legisla-
tion, that statesmen will in a very short time
be forced to initiate the changes whose full
development will have become time-honoured
by the end of this century. The organisation
of political opposition in parliaments has
reached a point which makes it evident that
before long the minority in parliaments will
have become a nonentity. The minority, in
fact, has already, here and in other countries
(of which the Austro-Hungarian empire is, at
the moment, the most noticeable example), be-
come so powerful for obstruction of business
that, by a sort of paradox, its power is on the
eve of complete destruction. At St Stephen's
the effect of obstruction working in this
manner is plainly visible. Whatever party is
in power will always, so long as the existing
system continues, be obliged to silence the
opposition by the force of parliamentary
machine ; and whatever party is in power will
always be accused of tyranny and autocracy by
the other party. In practice there is no
method by which any important government
measure can be passed through the House of
Commons except by force. It is a mere farce

IMPOTENT PARLIAMENT 261

to make a show of debating the details in
committee. Naturally the Opposition, when it
does not want the measure passed at all, will
delay its passage to the last possible moment,
and will make its enactment impossible unless
a term is set to the deliberations of committee
of the whole house. Whether the time granted
by the Government be long or short makes no
difference : it is impossible to pass any serious
and complex bill except by the closure. In
other words, the Government (which practically
means the Civil Service officials and parlia-
mentary draftsmen employed by the particular
department concerned with the bill — the Home
Office, the Local Government Board Office, the
Exchequer, or what not) must triumph. Even
the suggestions of individual supporters of the
administration in power must be ignored, un-
less there is a cave which might turn out the
ministry altogether. In detail, therefore, we
are governed, not by Parliament, but by the
permanent officials, so far as really important
Government measures are concerned : and it is
quite evident that bills introduced by private
members will very soon not be considered at
all. The private member is rapidly being re-
duced to nothingness by the force of parlia-
mentary development. Meantime, the waste
of public time by the introduction and debating
of bills which the Opposition eventually
succeeds in destroying, is appalling, and of

262 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

course it is aggravated by the idiotic rule which
destroys at the end of each session all the work
which has been begun and not completed.
The system, not less imbecile, in which opinion
is ascertained in Parliament is another great
time- waster. It is only necessary to ask for a
single moment what our grandsons, or even
the younger of our children, will think of a
Parliament in which a vote was taken
by solemnly walking through lobbies, with
elaborate arrangements for counting and
checking the members (when it might all be
done by the simple use of an electric signal in
front of each seat in the chamber) in order to
perceive the miserable inadequacy of even the
mechanical arrangements of all the parliaments
of the world. And if even all the crass follies
and mediaeval stupidities of modern parlia-
mentary arrangements were reformed, as nine-
tenths of them could be by any competent
board composed of a few engineers, electricians
and architects, we should still be in possession
of a legislative machine such as the intelligence
of a hundred years hence would laugh to scorn
if its restoration were suggested.

Nor is this all. The whole institution of
parliaments, as a contrivance for giving effect
to the will of the peoples, has long been utterly
inadequate, and must be reformed from the
bottom. We elect members to carry out
schemes of legislation and forms of policy

THE FARCE OF THE BALLOT 263

never fully, and sometimes not even partially,
formulated, upon which, even if they were set
out in full detail, we could not possibly have
any complete influence in giving our votes.
For instance, let us suppose that, at a general
election, one party wishes to increase the Navy,
to abolish publicans' compensation, and to
legalise marriage with a deceased wife's sister :
while the other party not only objects to all
these three proposals but also wishes to put a
protective tariff on foodstuffs and machinery,
to give Home Rule to Ireland, and to dis-
establish the Church of England. A Home
Ruler who was also a teetotaler could not vote
for either party without outraging one or other
of his convictions. A believer in the support
of our national supremacy who also considered
that the Church ought to be disestablished
would have to choose between voting against
the increase of the Navy or against the Dis-
establishment : and the Deceased Wife's Sister
Bill advocate must vote against all the proposals
on the other side (all of which he may agree
with) if he do not wish to assist in perpetuating
what he believes to be a hardship to his fellow-
countrymen, and very possibly to some of his
own friends, or to himself. And any of these
perplexed voters, having somehow contrived
to strike a balance with his conscience, and
to give a vote, will, perhaps, in a year's, or in
six years', time find that he has been the

264 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

instrument of placing in power an administration
which is now proceeding to pass measures that
he abhors. He has no redress. Nor, abandon-
ing the extreme case of such highly-mixed
policies as I have endeavoured to amuse the
reader by imagining, has the voter who
changes his mind, or who finds that he has
been bamboozled with false promises, any
means of helping to undo the harm he has
helped to do. It used to be said that, on an
average, parliamentary government worked
well — that it carried out in a rough way the
will of the people. But the peoples of a
hundred years hence are going to be much
more particular about matters of such high im-
portance. They are not going to be content
with a rough approximation in matters of the
very highest moment when they are able to
secure with perfect accuracy most of their
wishes in matters of quite minor importance.
They will not be satisfied to know exactly
what time it is at any moment of the day (as of
course they will know, all instruments for time-
measuring being controlled by wireless syn-
chronisation) and not to know exactly what their
rulers are going to do about matters upon
which the very fate of the country may depend.
Neither will they have remained so stupid as to
think that whatever one body of politicians
considers right must be right and that whatever
another body thinks right must necessarily be

THE REFERENDUM SYSTEM 265

wrong. It is quite certain that in a really in-
telligent age so clumsy a system as that of
party government will have been relegated to
oblivion.

The political machinery to replace it will be
of a nature determined by causes much too
complex to be foreseen, except in the merest
outline, as yet ; and probably it will, like most
political institutions, be a development rather
than an invention. The system, already talked
of, by which any matter of great national im-
portance should be made a referendum, the
subject of a direct vote by the whole nation,
is no doubt capable of ingeniously modified
arrangement so as to provide for its expeditious
use, without undue interference with the course
of ordinary business. But obviously this de-
vice is only capable of limited application, and
it could not be employed at all, without pro-
ducing dangerous confusions and incongruities,
except in a community whose political education
had made strides almost inconceivable in the
light of our present limited experience. It is
difficult to see how the general legislative
business of a considerable nation could be
carried on unless by committees of a parlia-
mentary character ; and limited as we are by
the history of political institutions arising out
of states of public intelligence which will have
become contemptible in comparison with the
intelligence of the next century, there is a

OF THE * '

UNIVERSITY

266 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

difficulty in conceiving how such committees
or parliaments could work out otherwise than
on some sort of party system. But the analogy
of progress in general may help us to a con-
jecture, which is here offered only for what it
is worth. All progress, as we know it, is a
development from the homogeneous to the
heterogeneous. One form of progress consists
of the development of specialism. At one
time, and not so very long ago, every house-
wife made her own jams, pickles, perfumes,
essences and condiments, which are now pur-
chased ready made. A man of science, in
Davy's time, often embraced a number of
different branches as his province ; whereas
now even a single science is seldom completely
handled by any individual professor, entomo-
logists differentiating themselves from general
biologists, and coleopterists from general
entomologists. Does it not appear likely,
then, that the functions of the politician and of
the legislator will presently be differentiated,
with great advantage to nations? In a
legislature of the present time professional
law-makers are numerically few, and not very
highly regarded. While in a matter relatively
unimportant, like coach-building, civilisation
has made specialism necessary ; in a matter
of the highest importance, the making of a
nation's laws, we continue to trust the general
practitioner, and the suggestion that specialists

PARLIAMENT, A.D. 2000 267

alone should be employed in it would probably
awaken a torrent of objection not unmingled
with execration. But specialism of all sorts will
have extended its sway to such an extent a
hundred years hence that the likeliest solution
of the difficulties at present envisaged is that
the business of law-making will be relegated to
a specially qualified and specially educated class,
and that parliaments, if they exist at all, will
have nothing to do with it, but will concern
themselves with what they are often rather
contumeliously told now is not their business
(though it ought to be) ; namely, the manage-
ment of international policy. The way in
which this evolution will come about is, more-
over, fairly easy to imagine. At some time
during the century the manifold confusions,
inconsistencies and evident inconveniences of
the existing corpus of the law are pretty sure
to require drastic and laborious treatment,
which can only be administered by professional
experts. At the same time, the public, having
awakened to the ludicrous fact that laws are
passed in every session of every Parliament in
the world, which, when they come to be
administered, break down because they have
either been so stupidly and unimaginatively con-
ceived, or so clumsily expressed in the statutes
which embody them, that practical working
immediately reveals their fatal defects. A
clever young lawyer once said to the present

268 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

writer that he knew of no intellectual pleasure
so delightful as that of discovering how to
circumvent the provisions of an Act of Parlia-
ment. This diverting, if immoral, remark
illustrates the faults of a social system in which
laws are made chiefly by persons having little
experience in the working of laws, and elected
to that duty by persons having no such ex-
perience at all. Having in mind the fact that
international law is already relegated practically
to specialists, it requires no great effort of
imagination to foresee that the Hercules that
will cleanse the Augean stable of the Statute
Book will be a committee of professors of law.
And once the public has become familiarised
with the idea, what more natural than that a
similar body should be formed to provide
against such legislative blunders as we were
all recently laughing at, when, having pro-
vided for the restraint of habitual drunkards
by placing them on what was called the black
list, Parliament presently learned that it had so
framed the law that no one could be black-
listed except by his own consent? The
development from this to a system by which
laws would not merely be amended, but de-
vised ab ovo, by professional legislators, is easy
to foresee ; and with properly-devised precau-
tions to ensure that the laws created shall
express the will of a sovereign people sufficiently
educated in political duty to possess a will worthy

DIPLOMACY, A.D. 2000 269

of consideration, probably no better solution of
the legislative difficulty can be imagined.

The conduct of foreign affairs is a matter
much less easy to reform. If despotisms were
not such desperately untrustworthy things, a
good sound autocracy would probably be the
best form of government for the function of
conducting the affairs of one nation with
another. The extraordinary diplomatic success
of Russia is an evidence of this. But Russia
also illustrates the drawbacks of despotism.
In its management of foreign affairs Russia
has (despite the habit which its departments
occasionally display of acting in conflict with
one another) beaten all the civilised nations.
Russia has a " continuous'* foreign policy.
There are no changes of ministers to nullify
each other's work and to encourage the diplo-
matists of other nations to procrastinate and
shilly-shally over negotiations in the hope that
a general election will bring in a new set of
statesmen, easier to deal with. And Russia
can herself procrastinate, prevaricate and play
all sorts of tricks, neglect her promises, ignore
her pledges, and prosecute her cryptic aims,
without the smallest fear of a question in
Parliament to spoil her game by letting all the
world into her dark and devious secrets. The
more a nation becomes democratised, the less
competent it is to manage its foreign policy
against less democratic nations, and a truly

270 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

popular Government is, in the present state
of the world, about the worst conceivable
instrument for that purpose. With an ever-
increasing democratisation of all governments
such as we are sure to witness during this
century, foreign offices of the present kind will
become more and more incompetent until some
sort of machinery is invented in their place.

Nor will the disappearance of the ultimate
resort to arms, as a possibility always threaten-
ing in the background, tend to improve
matters. It will, on the contrary, make them
worse. There can be no doubt that the awful
fear of war, which must haunt the pillow of
every statesman in our day with dreams of
pitiable horror, does exercise an influence in
settling controversies which, without this
terror, would drag their slow length along
from generation to exasperated generation.
And if we try to imagine that the in-
creased conscientiousness of a better time
will help nations to deal more honourably
with each other, it is to be feared that even
the vast progress of the quick-moving century
on which we have entered will not suffice to
bind the princes to its pleasure and teach their
senators wisdom. It is unfortunately in
regard to honour between nation and nation
that conscience develops most slowly, and
many a man who would scorn to trick a fellow-
citizen, or even defraud a railway company,

DIPLOMACY, A.D. 2000 271

and who would quite possibly hesitate
before smuggling a box of cigars through
the custom-house, will calmly advocate acts
of international dishonesty and oppres-
sion abhorrent to any conscientious mind.

There can be no doubt that the most
deleterious influence of our times, which
encourages nations to delay and deny to each
other justice and the fulfilment of solemn
obligations, is the habit of waiting upon the
chances of a minister's fall, and a resulting
change of policy. So long as almost any day
may bring a new set of statesmen, predisposed
against anything which their predecessors may
have approved, diplomacy will be disfigured
by ways that are dark and tricks that are vain :
and the logical twentieth of the centuries may
be trusted to perceive this. Consequently
some method will have to be devised by which
a continuous foreign policy may be made
compatible with the performance of a nation's
will. And here the wiser nature of the new
age will assist the constructive genius of the
reformer. No doubt the habit of changing
our minds on the basic principles of govern-
ment about once every six years will have
been eradicated. Peoples will deliberate more
intelligently upon the important questions
which they decide by their votes : and it will
no longer be thought — or rather, we shall no
longer act as if we thought — that a modifica-

272 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

tion of general opinion in regard (say) to
Home Rule for Ireland must necessarily carry
with it a change of opinion as to whether
it is desirable to extend our influence in
Afghanistan. When this error is abandoned,
probably foreign affairs will no longer be made
part and parcel of the work of the same set of
men that is elected to manage domestic policy.
It will then be possible for the people to
express — as they rarely have any opportunity
to express under the present system — their
sovereign will in regard to international
matters. And here, as everywhere, responsi-
bility will certainly exercise an educative
influence. When men intelligently realise
that by their votes they are deciding the fate
of their country, they will deliberate long
before yielding a decision so momentous. In-
asmuch as the foreign affairs of any nation are
truly understood only by a very limited class,
because very few people are willing to give up
enough of their leisure to the studies necessary
for such an understanding, it seems reasonable
to think that one feature of the polity of the
year 2000 may be the limitation of the right to
vote on foreign affairs to men and women who
have demonstrated in some sufficient manner
their competence to assist in directing the
action of their representatives in matters so
intricate. The increased leisure with which
other reforms already foreseen will endow the

THE STATE AS TRADER 273

people will of course facilitate the acquirement
of this competence, and the right to vote on
foreign affairs will doubtless be a coveted
social distinction, subserving the perennial love
of titles and the childlike pleasure of having
letters after one's name. Nor need we be too
much daunted in this conjecture by the
whispered word " oligarchy/' When oligarchy
really means government by those best
qualified to govern — the nature of this " best-
ness " being intelligently determined —
oligarch/ will be recognised as the most satis-
factory form of government : and in order to
exclude objectionable one-sidedness in the
method of selecting voters for the high duty
of guarding the nation's honour, no doubt some
method of selection by vote can be discovered,
free from liability to reintroduce the baleful
evil of party.

Coming now to other functions of a State,
the most obvious subject for conjecture is that
suggested by the tendency in recent times of
governments (and following their example of
municipalities) to engage in trade. The com-
ment which gained currency over a decade
ago, that we were all socialists then, is still
more justified now. Will States continue their
increasing practice of usurping the place of
private adventurers? Will railways, canals,
telephonic and teleautographic systems, street
conveyances, and so forth, be owned and

274 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

controlled by various public authorities, after
education, some other functions, including the
feeding and clothing of poor children during
school age, and the care of the unemployed
(which States before long will certainly have em-
braced) have by a more enlightened polity been
returned to the proper hands? The whole
question of whether socialism is a probable
solution of the difficulties which its advocates
believe it capable of solving is here involved.
Applying our familiar principle of estimating
the tendencies of the future by the trend of
events in the past, it seems certain that there
will for a good many years immediately to
come be an increase in the functions assumed
by the State : but that the whole plunge into
socialism will not be undertaken. For, while
measures undisguisedly socialistic in character
are more and more advocated and adopted, the
open principle of State socialism seems to find
less support every year. Whenever distress
becomes prevalent, plenty of writers, for
instance, loudly denounce Governments for not
finding work for everyone who fails to find
work for himself — so long as he is a man !
(No one appears to think it the Government's
duty to find work for women.) But when
socialism is openly propounded, the same
authors just as vehemently denounce the
socialistic system to which this principle of
regarding the State as the duty-bound

THE STATE AS TRADER 275

employer of the workless clearly tends. What
will most likely happen is that devices, more and
more socialistic, for dealing with emergencies,
and inconveniences of various sorts, will be
adopted and maintained until their own incon-
venience and injustice have made themselves
felt : and then a more reasonable age will get
rid of them — better remedies having meantime
been discovered — at the same time perceiving
their deleterious effect upon private respon-
sibility, and wondering why it has tolerated the
old methods so long. In other words, social-
istic experiments will have demonstrated their
own evils before the habit of indulging in them
has gone so far as to allow States to drift the
whole way into socialism. It is even possible
that the example of some single nation, drift-
ing thus far, and setting up a socialistic State,
may serve as a useful warning to the rest of
the world, and determine the gradual abandon-
ment of the dangerous tendencies which will
have increasingly manifested themselves. For
it is certain that, unless in exceptional and
abnormal instances — of which the Australian
Commonwealth is very likely to furnish an
example — political systems will always continue
to develop by evolutionary, and not by
revolutionary, steps. We shall pass gradually,
and by a process of construction and elimina-
tion, from one condition to another, until the
very greatly improved system of government

276 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

and administration whose period of existence I
have ventured to place at about the beginning
of the next century, has become general
throughout the world.

We may, for instance, very easily imagine
how a more intelligent electorate will abolish
some abuses, by considering the condition of
the post-office department of this and other
countries. It is hardly thinkable that, during
any period of the world's history, the business
of carrying letters can be thrown open to any-
one who chooses to undertake it. If there
were nothing to be dealt with except the
domestic correspondence of each nation,
probably it would be a great deal better that it
should be thus thrown open to competition : it
is hardly likely that the vast business of
international correspondence can ever be satis-
factorily conducted, except by administrations
acting in the name and behalf of every State.
But there is not the least reason for thinking
that the abuses which deface the postal depart-
ment of this and every other nation will be
perpetual. The British post-office contributes
annually a " profit " of several millions sterling
to the Exchequer. Every person who writes
a letter, therefore, is taxed for doing it. In
proportion to the intelligence, commercial
enterprise, family affection, or professional
diligence by which he is prompted to use
correspondence, every one of us is compelled

THE POST-OFFICE, A.D. 2000 277

to contribute something more to the up-keep
of the State than his neighbour who is too
lazy, too ignorant or too callous to trouble
himself with letter-writing. No doubt it is
impossible, without a loss which would amount
to subsidising in an equally objectionable
manner, the users of the post-office, to conduct
that department except at a profit of some
sort : but it surely will not be pretended that it
could not be conducted without exacting such
a surplus as the post-office does annually
contribute to the Budget. The vicious manner
in which we treat the postal service as a sort
of trading department, expected to yield the
Chancellor of the Exchequer a convenient sum
towards his expenditure, is illustrated by the
disgraceful underpayment of the minor officials,
such as postmen, small post-masters, telegraph
messengers and the like. The post-office
buys its labour in the cheapest market : there
is but too much reason for the belief that it
treats with oppressive harshness attempts on
the part of its servants to better their wages
by organisation : and when reproved in the
House of Commons for sweating his work-
people, a postmaster-general can always reply,
amid applause, that he dare not embarrass his
right-honourable friend the Chancellor of the
Exchequer. The polity of the enlightened
future will assuredly desist from penalising
intelligence, enterprise, and the other com-

278 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

mendable characteristics which tend to increase
a man's correspondence ; and the postmaster-
general who will be praised a hundred years
hence will be that one who has succeeded in
managing his department with the smallest
possible surplus. We have only to envisage
the obvious justice of this ambition to perceive
the objections which attach to the adoption of
trading functions by the State. Though it is
very likely that railways will be nationalised in
this, as they have been nationalised or subsi-
dised in many other countries, it is quite certain
that if we do nationalise them we shall be com-
pensated by none of the advantages which
make us tolerant, and even unconscious, of
the abuses of the British post-office — itself in
most respects one of the least imperfect of
bureaucracies. The faults generally found with
railways are precisely the faults of bureau-
cracy, and in propqrtion as railways become
more and more united in their policy, through
amalgamation and arrangements for mutual
assistance, those faults constantly increase.
The same will presently be found true of all
governmental usurpations of private enterprise :
and it cannot be doubted that in this, as in so
many other respects, the functions of govern-
ments will be greatly reduced a hundred years
hence.

One subject which cannot be neglected in
any attempt to foresee the conditions of the

THE LAW OF MARRIAGE 279

law in the next century is the delicate and
difficult one of marriage laws : and on no
subject are differences of opinion so numerous
and so acute. All that seems to be generally
agreed is that under the present system
inconveniences and immoralities occur : and
it is (of course) supposed to be a corollary
that if the system were changed these incon-
veniences and immoralities would disappear.
This is the usual method of considering social
difficulties. Hardly anyone will consent to
base plans for the future upon experience of
the past. It is always presumed that new
laws can reform abuses, without changes in
the spirit of the age, which gives rise to the
abuses. One class of thinkers, despairing of
moral improvement, considers that, immorality
being irremediable, the only thing to be done
is to give it sanction ; as it must exist, it must
be made respectable and unscandalous. An-
other set of reformers would penalise immor-
ality by forbidding the guilty party in a divorce
suit to re-marry, just as there are people who
would prevent the physically unfit from marry-
ing at all. Both forget that the prohibition of
legal unions is much more likely to lead to an
increase of irregular connections than to
produce any other effect. No doubt we could
improve the physical standard of the legiti-
mately born by the prohibition last digressively
mentioned : but it would be at the expense of

280 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

an increase in illegitimate births accompanied
by the additional disadvantage of bodily
weakness. Similarly, so far from the prohibi-
tion of re-marriage restraining the immorally
disposed, it is much more likely that it would
encourage them : the fact that a co-respondent
could not be called upon to marry the woman
divorced in consequence of her guilty associa-
tion with him would hardly act generally as a
deterrent ; while, if he had been willing to face
the probable consequences of publicity, expense
and inconvenience attending a liaison with a
woman under coverture, the co-respondent
would not think it necessary to abandon his
confederate, if he wished, and she were willing,
to continue their connection after all the
penalties had been suffered, merely because
the law prevented a regular union. It is
agreed by all jurists that the only justification
for the greater severity with which matrimonial
infidelity is visited on women as compared
with men is the greater social degradation
with which society visits women who have
offended. To penalise their offence by
prohibiting re-marriage would only perpetuate
their degradation, and does in fact so per-
petuate and increase it in countries where the
condemned party in a divorce is forbidden the
altar.

On the other hand, to recognise a sort of
promiscuity, as some writers have suggested

THE LAW OF MARRIAGE 281

that we shall be obliged to do, would probably
be attended by worse effects than the bold
and straightforward acceptance of polygamy
as a necessary remedy for the excess of
feminine population, which a writer of letters to
the shocked and astonished newspapers of this
city recently proposed. Neither expedient is
capable of being adopted : nor does there seem
much likelihood that public morality can be
improved by legislation, though it is certain
to be much improved by the spontaneous
amelioration of public sentiment, No doubt
in one or two particulars the marriage laws
will gradually undergo amendment. It will
be realised that it is much more immoral
to compel unwilling couples to live to-
gether matrimonially, than to set them free
to remedy one of the most hideous of all
possible mistakes. The difficulty of deter-
mining what shall be done where one party
wishes for divorce, while the other does not, is
greater : but on the whole it will probably be
considered more conducive to morality to
dissolve the marriage here, after a pre-
cautionary and experimental period of pro-
visional separation, than to insist upon its
perpetuation. That age will only be ripe for
such a reform as this, which, by moral progress,
has rendered intolerable the position of a
libertine capable of entering into matrimony
with the deliberate intention of getting out of

282 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

it again when it ceases to be attractive, and in
which the social estimate of a person who
acted in the same manner through insta-
bility of character would be not much
better. In any reform of the kind sug-
gested, it would no doubt be arranged that
pecuniary liabilities, allocated to the support
and education of children, would follow the
party insisting on divorce ; and this also
would act as a check upon dishonest contracts
of marriage.

Thus, for any radical improvement in the
system of matrimonial connections, we must
look to a corresponding improvement in the
spirit of the age, and the first step in advance
will have been taken when marriage ceases to
be the only legal contract which is enforced
notwithstanding the ignorance of a contracting
party as to the engagement entered into.
The frequency of divorce petitions will be
greatly diminished from the time we get rid of
the idiotic and almost incredibly wicked
convention by which we take every possible
precaution we can think of to ensure that a
girl, when she marries, shall have no possible
means of knowing to what she is committing
herself. No more ingenious contrivance for
obtaining marital infelicity could be imagined.
The next step will have been taken when it is
recognised as disgraceful for parents to put
pressure upon the inclinations of their children

THE POSITION OF WOMAN 283

of either sex to induce them to marry, and
when social execration renders such pressure
impossible. Concurrently with this, or as a
result of it, a third step will be some abate-
ment of our present entire neglect of any
demand for good character in a bridegroom
who would be outraged if he thought that the
least aspersion could be suggested concerning
his bride. In other words, the greatest im-
provements in the status of the world with
regard to matrimony will be effected when
we recognise the claim of woman to be
made the equal of man in knowledge, in dis-
cretion and in social rights. No legis-
lative reform as yet ever suggested could
have anything like as much effect in removing
the evils under which we groan, in respect
to matrimony, as this natural and inevitable
development.

Naturally the improvement in the position of
women in the new age will not arrive at a
bound, nor will their rights in relation to
marriage be unaccompanied by other rights at
present withheld, and perhaps not always un-
reasonably withheld. On the contrary, the
recognition of one set of rights will facilitate
and accelerate the recognition of the other. It
is generally agreed that the tendency of the
sexes is to become less divergent, intellectually
and morally, for reasons connected with what
Spencer calls " the less early arrest of individual

284 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

evolution, and the result everywhere seen
throughout the organic world, of a self-preserv-
ing power inversely proportionate to the race-
preserving power."1

As it will have been realised, long before the
advent of the next century, that the surest way
to improved capacity is to be found in increased
responsibility, women will not, a hundred years
hence, be allowed or compelled to shirk their
political obligations. We may see with half an
eye that every year women are becoming more
capable, and also more desirous of aiding the
counsels of the public : and in some of our
Colonies, as well as in some States of the
American Union, they are already voting, and
voting (as it turns out) with the most wonderful
intelligence and usefulness. The influence of
the female vote in, for example, New Zealand
has been for some time perceptible in the legis-
lation of that highly-enlightened colony : and I
never heard anyone object to the results of this
influence except persons whose conduct, or the
conduct which they approved in their associates,
was likely to be inconvenienced by them. It is
no doubt true that women are a great deal more
fond of demanding that the law should do work
which it would be better to leave to natural
developments of public character than could
be wished : but then so are men, and it is an
unquestionable thing that the misdeeds which
1 Study of Sociology \ Chapter XV.

SCIENTIFIC LEGISLATION 285

men more readily condone than women are
much more likely to be bad for public morality
than those which women condone more freely
than men. There is no particular reason for
thinking at the present time (though there was
ample reason for thinking a few decades ago)
that women will be more prone to legislate un-
necessarily, and therefore mischievously, than
men : and we are in any case bound to pass
through a good many years of parliament-
worship before we awaken to the fact that the
law cannot do everything, and that any reform
which is accomplished by the spontaneous
influence of public opinion is always a great
deal more complete, a great deal more con-
ducive to public self-respect, and a great deal
better adjusted to the special requirements of
every individual circumstance that it touches,
than one which is laboriously and mechanically
embodied in statutes which cannot but be im-
perfect, cannot possibly fail to act oppressively
and unjustly in one place or another, and
frequently prove to be unworkable from begin-
ning to end.

CHAPTER XII

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

" ON the other hand, after observing how the
processes that have brought things to their
present stage are still going on, not with a
decreasing rapidity indicating approach to
cessation, but with an increasing rapidity that
implies long continuance and immense transfor-
mations ; there follows the conviction that the
remote future has in store, forms of social life
higher than any we have imagined : there
comes a faith transcending that of the Radical,
whose aim is some re-organisation admitting of
comparison to organisations which exist. And
while this conception of societies has naturally
evolved, beginning with small and simple types
which have their short existences and disappear,
advancing to higher types that are larger, more
complex, and longer-lived, coming to still-
higher types like our own, great in size, com-
plexity, and duration, and promising types
transcending these in times after existing
societies have died away — while this concep-
tion of societies implies that in the slow course

286

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 287

of things changes almost immeasurable in
amount are possible, it also implies that but
small amounts of such changes are possible,
within short periods " — Herbert Spencer : The
Study of 'Sociology ', Chapter XVI.

It has repeatedly been necessary, in the
course of this survey, to stimulate the indul-
gence of the reader by a reminder, based upon
the speed of our progress in the past and its
steady acceleration in recent decades, that there
is much more danger of underestimating than
of exaggerating the advances likely to have
been achieved a hundred years hence. In
order to guard against misconception of the
manner in which these advances will be brought
about, it is now advisable to mention specific-
ally what has been once or twice hinted
parenthetically, namely, the fact that the pro-
gress of the Future is certain to be produced in
a way perfectly capable of being deduced from
the manner of our progress in the past. One
of the most fruitful causes of error in existing
prognostications has been the tacit assumption
that, at some vague moment in the spacious
middle-distance of the coming time, sudden
and cataclysmal movements of society, and
also unexpected and revolutionary discoveries
in science, will occur : and it is as a precaution
against one aspect of this mistake that a
weighty quotation from the writings of one of
the sanest and most perspicuous thinkers who

288 A HUNDRED YEAKS HENCE

have ever written upon that science of society
which he may almost be said to have created
has been recalled to the memory of the reader
at the head of this chapter.

The forecast now almost concluded, imperfect
and visionary as it must necessarily be, was
commenced with some reflections on the rate of
future progress made probable by the move-
ments of the recent past. But nothing whatever
can be deduced from what history, remote or
recent, shows us, to suggest that any stable
institution can be created otherwise than by
steady development : it is only the speed of
development which is likely to alter, and even
this will only alter by a progression gaining
impetus from the influence of its own com-
ponents. Whether we consider material im-
provements effected by science and invention
and the interaction of these ; or social improve-
ments effected by readjustment of the conditions
of life forced upon us through the influence of
intellectual and moral changes in the individual
units of society making themselves felt as
aggregated forces ; the manner of attainment is
nearly identical. It is commonly objected to
this view, that whereas science and invention
commonly progress in a movement characterised
(so to speak) by a succession of jerks, social
conditions change imperceptibly. But thus to
object is to overlook the fact that, while no doubt
society develops from time to time certain

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 289

needs whose growth is so steady as to preclude
the possibility of pointing to a final moment
when the satisfaction of them has become at
length inevitable, yet, when this satisfaction is
gained by legislative enactment, there is always
a moment when the public, ripe for a given re-
form, takes definite possession of it. For ex-
ample (to name a comparatively recent case), no
doubt the desire for some method by which the
public could distinguish between foreign and
home-made articles of merchandise had for some
time been generally felt before the passing of
the Merchandise Marks Act fixed a moment at
which all dubiety on the subject would vanish,
by endeavouring to require that any imported
object bearing marks calculated to give the im-
pression that it had been manufactured in Eng-
land should also bear a definite and correct
statement as to its place of origin. Whether we
consider this enactment to have been desirable
or not, it is impossible to deny that there was a
specific moment when it took effect. And simi-
larly, the bill for the repression of secret com-
missions in business has come so near to being
passed through Parliament that many people
imagine it to be already law, though it is not,
at the time of writing, even (in a technical sense)
before the legislature. Without question, there-
fore, public opinion is ripe for this reform, and
has with great gradualness become so : but the
reform itself, when it takes place (as it may quite
T

290 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

conceivably have taken place by the time this
book is printed), will occur suddenly. There
will be a day when the manager of a business
house could, with immunity from any overt
punishment except the loss of his employment,
receive a secret bribe from another house with
which he was doing business on behalf of his
master ; and a succeeding day on which, for the
same offence against commercial integrity, he
could be charged before a magistrate and ulti-
mately punished by the law. Thus the differ-
ence between scientific progress and social
progress is not so great as has been sometimes
imagined. And on the other hand, although to
the casual observer scientific discoveries and
new inventions often appear to have been
attained at a single step, to a person interested
in the particular branch of science, or the par-
ticular path of invention where a new achieve-
ment occurs, it is generally quite evident that
the latter has been led up to by steady progress
extending over a long period. The existence
of unidentified constituents in atmospheric air,
for instance, must have been long suspected
before the isolation of argon gave, to the public
eye, the impression of a sudden discovery :
and astronomical disturbances have generally
puzzled a great army of observers for a long
time before the public is indulged by the
announcement of a "new" star in the heavens.
To the reader who has been good enough to

INTERDEPENDENCE 291

grant any validity at all to the arguments by
which I have sought to show that, as time goes
on, there will be a decreasing tendency to
attempt desired reforms by legislative process,
and an increasing tendency to make the public
the guardian of its own security, it will be
evident that any differences which exist between
the nature of scientific progress and the nature
of social progress are likely to be accentuated
rather than diminished in the course of this
century. A change brought about by the
spontaneous activity of the people naturally
occurs without the definite line of demarcation
created by an Act of Parliament.

But there is one way in which the analogy
between scientific and social progress will be
noteworthy. It is a commonplace of industrial
history that an improvement in one machine,
or the introduction of some novel method of
applying power, always produces, and may very
often necessitate, modifications in a number of
procedures not previously seen to be connected
with it : and great results from little causes
flow. No one foresaw, when Mr Edison dis-
covered the differences in the electrical con-
ductivity of carbon induced by slight variations
of pressure — a discovery at first utilised only
in the micro-tasimeter, the appliance used for
measuring small changes in the size of objects
submitted to it — that the same discovery would
presently render commercially practicable the

292 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

electrical transmission of speech and numerous
other conveniences, themselves the progenitors
of fresh inventions now in constant use. Simi-
larly, political and social changes quite easy to
foresee will undoubtedly have effects which in
their entirety no one can possibly foresee. The
rate of advancement cannot be calculated like
a geometrical progression : all that we can
hope to do is to realise more or less vaguely
the acceleration which the action and interaction
of anticipated (and often antagonistic) forces
will produce ; the general manner of the world's
progress representing the resultant of their
activities. What we must constantly keep in
mind is the fact that changes in the institutions
of society can only be stable when they are the
result of corresponding changes in the temper
of the age which yields them. As this temper
is a thing of gradual development, we must
believe that many temporary expedients will
have to be tolerated by advanced thinkers
since (as Spencer remarks) society can only be
held together when the institutions existing,
and the conceptions generally current, are in
tolerable harmony. We can foresee many
changes which will be in beneficent existence
a hundred years hence ; but it would be irra-
tional to show impatience because these changes
cannot be immediately proposed ; since, being
not yet in harmony with the current concep-
tions of the world, their immediate adoption

THE ZEALOT'S COMFOET 293

would be mischievous instead of beneficial, and
their results anarchic instead of stable. For a
great many years we must go on passing laws
for the regulation of social life, which we can
quite easily perceive that the altered social life
of a future age will not need, because they
would be injurious to it. The zealous re-
former who wishes, as we must all wish, to
help the world in its wearied way to perfec-
tion must aim rather to assist the mind of
people to demand greater reforms than it could
as yet assimilate, than to procure the arrival of
reforms for which society is not yet ripe, and
must be content with the effort

" . . . to ease the burden of the world
Laboriously tracing what must be
And what may yet be better."

To say this is not to deprecate the greatest
possible energy in all endeavour that makes for
progress. The doctrine, founded upon a per-
ception of the impossibility of regenerating
society except by utilising the natural and
evolutionary movement of society itself, that
nothing ought to be done except to wait upon
this movement, betrays an evident confusion of
thought, akin to the fallacy of the schoolmen,
commonly called realism, partly adopted by
Comte. " Society " is not in itself an entity
separable from the units of society ; a progress
of society is only possible as the result of

294 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

human volition progressively exercised. What
we have to look for is a steady enlightenment
of public ideals, issuing in the triumph of wis-
dom over folly, of virtue over laxity, of progress
over reaction and inertia. Always there will
be differences of opinion, exercising a salutary
check upon hasty public action, and giving
time for the establishment of harmony between
the spirit of the age and the new institutions
which mark its progress.

Naturally there will have been many changes
in the material of daily life which, either because
they did not fit in with any one of the divisions
into which a forecast of the future naturally
fell, or because the consideration of them would
have obscured the exposition of matters more
immediately connected with each other, it has
not been possible to mention. For example,
we have had occasion to debate the methods
by which men and women will transact the
business of trade and commerce with the aid
of certain foreseen conveniences ; and we have
glanced at the probable future aspect of dwel-
lings, conveyances and similar conveniences ;
but nothing has been said as to the clothes in
which our descendants are likely to attire them-
selves or the enjoyment of these advantages.
The latter and a few other minor subjects may
perhaps be considered now, without very much
mutual connection.

The clothing of men and women happens to

WHEREWITHAL CLOTHED ? 295

illustrate rather appropriately the very same
tendency of civilised institutions to develop
by gradual, rather than violent, changes which
has just been referred to. For, while a good
deal is heard about the " vagaries " of fashion,
technical writers on the subject always seem to
be able to predict some time in advance the
movements of modish costume ; and they some-
times even condescend to explain the processes
of thought and observation by which their
apparently inspired predictions are arrived at.
Moreover, admitting, and allowing for, the
extremest variations in detail, costume in civil-
ised countries can hardly be said to have
materially and intrinsically altered — cannot,
that is to say, be said to have altered its funda-
mental characteristics — during a century, in the
case of men, nor during a great many centuries
in the case of women. Since the age of knee-
breeches succeeded the age of doublet and hose,
men have always protected their legs with
" bifurcated integuments " — some sort of double
tube secured to a copious bag enclosing the
middle of the body — and the upper part of the
trunk with a coat and waistcoat ; while women
have always worn bodices and petticoats of one
shape or another. Neither has the loudest
outcry against the irrationality of costume as a
whole, nor even the ridicule showered upon
single elements of it, ever had the least effect
in producing revolutionary modification. Punch

296 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

laughed in vain at crinolines ; Lord Ronald
Gower protests in vain against the silk " chim-
ney-pot " hat. Will a more scientific and a
more logical age replace absurd or otherwise
objectionable garments by others more reason-
ably designed, to such an extent as to produce
an entire change in the sartorial aspect of
civilised peoples ?

It is impossible to doubt that in some
respects it will. Already sensible women
decline to injure themselves and risk the injury
of their possible offspring at the command of
fashion. Tight-lacing and the wearing of such
corsets as unnaturally compress the internal
organs of the body are evidently near the end
of their long reign. In a comparatively short
time it is hardly possible to doubt that at least
these, the most evidently injurious articles of
clothing still surviving, will have joined the
farthingale and the ruff in the lumber-room of
the obsolete, and when what is really the more
reasonable moiety of mankind is thus within
easy reach of sacrificing to hygiene what was
dedicated to a wholly mistaken conception of
aesthetics, can we question that reforms in male
dress founded upon convenience and reason
will follow, even to the abandonment of the
silk hat? If one were asked to suggest the
various steps by which the ultimate costume of
the century, whether male or female, will be
arrived at, few would not boggle at the task.

WHEREWITHAL CLOTHED? 297

But the general nature of the more-or-less-per-
fected dress of a hundred years hence may
perhaps be not unsuccessfully imagined, having
in mind the considerations likely to determine
it.

We may be quite certain that two character-
istics will be demanded of all costume — that it
shall give to all movements of the body the
greatest possible freedom consistent with
warmth, and that it shall be as easy as possible
to put on and take off. The highly intellectual
life of the next century will certainly be im-
patient of anything which detains it with
occupations so uninteresting as the putting on
and taking off of clothes from pursuits more
attractive. Hence there will doubtless be a
great deal of simplification of details, the
greatest practical diminution in the number of
single objects worn. The essentials of a satis-
factory outfit will be, first, an inner garment
next the skin, worn merely for cleanliness ;
next a middle garment for warmth, and finally
an outer suit for protection. The innermost
garment will no doubt be made of some fabric
not much unlike the soft silky papers now made
in Japan, so that it can be destroyed as soon as
it is taken off. It is not in the least likely that so
insanitary and degrading an occupation as that
of the washerwoman can survive in a civilisation
really advanced. The middle garment, com-
pletely cleansable by vacuum action and oxy-

298 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

genation, will of course have to be made of some
vegetable fibre like cotton or flax. It will most
likely be some developed form of " combina-
tion," easy to put on and take off, fastening by
means of a single knot or button, and will be
just tight enough to give freedom to the move-
ments. Its warmth will be dependent upon
contained air, and it, like everything else we
wear, will be highly porous ; for the importance
of properly ventilating the skin, perfectly well
understood even now, will by that time be also
acted upon. Thus far male costume and female
costume will be practically identical. There is
no reason to expect, however, that this identity
will be carried so far as the externals of dress,
because realising (as we shall of course realise)
the tendency of the sexes to become less
divergent in their natural and moral character-
istics, we shall instinctively seek to maintain all
the salutary and romantic contrast that we can.
But it is not to be believed that woman, already
long since emancipated from the corset, will
have continued a slave to the skirt, the petticoat
and other restraining garments. With under-
clothes practically identical with the sensible
garments of men, our female descendants will
no doubt wear a costume much like what Miss
Rehan wore as Rosalind — a tunic and knee-
skirt (probably in one) with gaiters made of
some elastic material.

Deprived as we shall be of animal products,

WHEREWITHAL CLOTHED ? 299

the leather boot will naturally be unavailable,
and a totally different kind of foot covering will
be used. But it is not the absence of leather
which will determine this change. Perfectly
satisfactory boots of the present form are worn
by some extreme vegetarians already, carrying
consistency to its limit. With the disappearance
of the horse from the streets, however — a dis-
appearance which will doubtless be at least
seventy years old by this time next century (for
the motor car is fast pushing out the horse
already) — the chief need for an entirely imper-
vious foot-covering will have been obviated.
Towns will be sanitary underfoot — they are
disgusting now — and free from mud ; while the
drying appliances mentioned in an earlier
chapter will clear away rain as fast as it falls.
Consequently it will no longer be necessary to
wear uncomfortable, unhealthy and deforming
boots ; the human foot will cease to be the
source of discomfort it now more or less acutely
is to nine people out of every ten, and we shall
be much better walkers and athletes. For
health will be the consideration dominating all
our actions, health being a subject of careful
tuition in every school : and as men and women
will rarely need to use muscular strength in
their work, they will gratify the natural yearning
of healthy animals for exertion, in athletic
sports, by no means confined to the male sex.
Whether fashion as an institution will con-

300 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

tinue to exist is doubtful, but probably it will
not exhibit the extravagances, nor the capricious
development which now characterise it, and "a
general uniformity with infinitesimal differ-
ences," which has been defined as one of
Nature's uniformities, will be perceptible in the
natural development of the race.

Of course one object sought consciously or
unconsciously to be attained by the use of
fashions is class distinction ; and similarly
jewellery is probably worn much more because
it is a sign of wealth than because of any
intrinsic beauty which it is supposed to possess.
At one time a man's occupation (and conse-
quently his rank in society) could be ascertained
by his dress ; and sumptuary laws occasionally
made such distinctions obligatory. It is no
doubt of some law of his own time that
Shakespeare was thinking1 when he made
the tribune in Julius Cczsar reprove the work-
men for appearing on a business-day without
the leather aprons which marked their trade :—

" What, know you not
Being mechanical you ought not walk,
Upon a labouring day, without the sign
Of your profession ? "

Will class distinction survive the democratising
influence of a century ?

1 At least this was the opinion of the editors of the
Clarendon Press edition of the Plays.

I
I

CLASS DISTINCTIONS 301

The dress of our own time tends to obliterate
the evidence of these distinctions ; but a
development from heterogeneity to homogeneity
is a reversal of the usual law of progress, and
it can hardly be called a sign of social advance-
ment that artisans of our day generally wear,
when at work, the cast-off clothes of the em-
ploying classes, bought second-hand, and for
" Sunday best " often ape the fashions of the
rich. In a hundred years' time assuredly no
worker will be ambitious to give himself the
aspect of an idler, and one may perpend the
dry answer of an American to the remark that
in the United States there is no leisure-class.
" Oh, yes, there is," said the moralist, " only we
don't call them that ; we call them tramps."
Everyone will take pride in his work, when
work is no longer treated with the disgraceful
contempt which we are only by degrees be-
coming ashamed of. Consequently the clothes
worn at work will no doubt be, in every trade,
specially designed to facilitate the exertions of
the worker : and in the copious hours of
leisure there will be variety, increased by the
wearing of special garments for special amuse-
ments. It is difficult to believe that anyone,
whatever his work, will dispense with the
comfort of a complete change of dress when
play-time comes : and the ingenious simplifica-
tion of fastenings, and the reduced number of
garments worn, will facilitate the enjoyment of

302 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

this luxury. Everyone will dress for dinner—
but not (one fancies) in a " swallow-tail" coat
and stiff shirt. It is quite certain that all our
clothes will be soft, supple, porous, light and
warm a hundred years hence, and the clear-
starcher will no longer have the opportunity to
destroy them.

Some attempt has already been made to
suggest the general domestic and architectural
conveniences of the next century, but the
subject of furniture has not been referred to in
detail. Allowing for the fact that animal fabrics,
as wool, leather, etc., will be absent, there is
no particular reason why chairs, carpets and
curtains should be very different from what
they are now. No doubt light metallic alloys
will often be used in the framework of chairs
and tables instead of wood, because the
tendency of civilisation is to make things
lighter and less cumbersome whenever this is
possible. At one time it might have been
thought that upholstery, carpets and curtains
would have to be dispensed with. But to a
thoughtful observer there must always have
been a difficulty here. A wooden chair, and
even a rattan one, however cunningly shaped,
is so extremely discomfortable to sit in without
cushions, that it was easier to imagine that
invention would correct the unhealthiness of
cushions and stuffing, than that an advanced
age would consent to dispense with these

" THE COMFORTS OF HOME " 303

luxuries. The manner in which the former
solution of the difficulty would be attained was
actually foreseen by the present writer before
the introduction of vacuum cleaning was accom-
plished, and several passages in an earlier
chapter had to be rewritten when what had
been somewhat fancifully described as a con-
venience of the future suddenly became an
existing factor of the present : and in one or
two places innovations have similarly called for
changes in the text — a circumstance which, it
is to be hoped, will give pause to critics
disposed to condemn certain suggestions in
this book as chimerical.1 Obviously, now that
we can thoroughly cleanse and free from every
particle of dust by a simple mechanical process
any fabric or mass of fabrics, there is no longer
any reason to expect that our descendants will,
on hygienic grounds, find it necessary to
dispense with comforts so essential to restful
leisure as easy-chairs, soft carpets and wall
hangings.

On the other hand, it is quite certain that
numerous inventions will enhance and beautify
the luxury of an age where rational luxury
will reign universally. One source of frequent

1 While actually correcting the proof sheets I read in a
London evening newspaper, The Star, that gramophones
had been utilised in certain schools for the teaching of
foreign languages, a device I had suggested in the chapter
on Education as likely to be adopted in the schools of the
future.

304 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

discomfort to-day is the necessity of living
always in rooms of one size. Whether we sit
alone, or entertain a number of friends, the
same apartment has to serve our needs : con-
sequently we are crowded on one day and chilly
on the next. With combustion abolished as a
heating device, there will be no objection
against light sliding walls — a convenience long
since adopted by our allies the Japanese — which
would be rather dangerous nowadays and not
particularly desirable, at all events in England,
where we have no means of warming most
rooms except a fire on one side, and no means
of cooling them at all except by letting in
draughts and noise through the window. No
doubt when matches and fireplaces, about
equally causative of conflagration, have van-
ished, and when we have invented methods
of warming the air in houses without the
horrible drying of it caused by the American
pipe-stove system, houses will be much more
lightly built : and it is certainly not going to
be impossible to use thin, light walls without
being able to hear in each room every sound
that occurs in the next. Concurrently, we shall
be able to change the size of rooms — a con-
venience greater than might be supposed by
those who have not thought about the matter.
In summer we shall just as easily cool our
houses as we shall heat them in winter. Very
few servants will be required (another great

" THE COMFORTS OF HOME " 305

comfort) ; and lighting arrangements will
naturally be free from their present inade-
quacy.

Except that no one has yet troubled to think
about it, there is surely no reason why bathing
should be such a tedious operation as it is.
Probably the speediest dresser of our own
day does not consume less than a quarter of an
hour over his morning tub and the operation of
drying himself. A hundred years hence, people
will be so avid of every moment of life, life
will be so full of busy delight, that time-saving
inventions will be at a huge premium. It is
not because we shall be hurried in nerve-
shattering anxiety, as it is often complained
that we now are, but because we shall value at
its true worth the refining and restful influence
of leisure, that we shall be impatient of the
minor tasks of every day. The bath of the
next century will lave the body speedily with
oxygenated water delivered with a force that
will render rubbing unnecessary, and beside it
will stand the drying cupboard, lined with
some quickly-moving arrangement of soft
brushes, and fed with highly desiccated air,
from which, almost in a moment, the bather
will emerge, dried, and with a skin gently
stimulated, and perhaps electrified, to clothe
himself quickly and pass down the lift to his
breakfast, which he will eat to the accompani-
ment of a summary of the morning's news read
u

306 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

out for the benefit of the family, or whispered
into his ears by a talking-machine.

Does this manner of beginning the day sound
like a nightmare ? That is only because the
purpose of it has been overlooked. Not be-
cause they will be " short " of time will our
descendants thus arrange their lives, but be-
cause they wish to reserve as much time as
possible for culture (physical as well as in-
tellectual) and for thought ; which the better
distribution of wealth and labour will facilitate ;
while labour itself, everywhere performed in-
telligently and with interest, will be no longer
irksome. The working man will ply his trade
with zest — working for himself and family—
instead of seeking every opportunity to shirk
and evade it. And, his task accomplished, he
will hasten to enjoyments as elevating as labour
itself.

Will man then, the critic may ask incre-
dulously, have really been perfected in a
century? Decidedly not. But unless we
doubt the evidence which shows that improved
institutions not only arise out of improved
popular character, but also help to promote it,
we cannot resist the inference that the removal
of many causes of degradation must bring us
nearer to perfection, to which the moral evolu-
tion of the race is slowly proceeding. There
is nothing Utopian in the belief that honesty,
truthfulness, respect for the rights of others, will

PERFECTION ? 307

be fostered by the increased intelligence of the
new age; and from the moment when this in-
telligence, disseminated throughout all society,
begins to make the moral improvement of the
race a prime object in every social reform, in
every piece of legislation (emancipating as well
as restrictive) we have a right to expect the pro-
gress of morality to receive a marked impetus.
;c Nature, careless of the single life," will be
assisted in the perfecting of the moral type,
and the dishonest man, the liar, the sensualist,
and the man too stupid to be unselfish, will
become with every decade less fit for survival,
because the same unwisdom which is at the
bottom of his faults will handicap him in the
battle of life, will hinder him in the competition
for the right to perpetuate his characteristics
in children born of his loins. It is only those
who conceive of the race as capable of remain-
ing stationary, or moving backward, in morals,
while in every other respect it moves forward
with constantly-increasing momentum, who
imagine that cunning and unscrupulousness
are likely to be fostered by enlarged civilisa-
tion. So long as we allow the world to be
exploited for the selfish advantage of a hand-
ful of millionaires, no doubt these characteristics
will continue at a premium. But it is impos-
sible to believe that the irresistible power of
the mass of humanity will submit in perpetuity
to be thus made the tools of a minority. If the

308 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

" ruling" classes wished to maintain that status
they should have kept the people from the
schoolroom. Numbers must inevitably pre-
vail, and the world will have reorganised
itself in ways which, if we could foresee them
in their entirety, would suggest an almost
unthinkable perfection.

INDEX

ACTOR, the (his art), 61
Agriculture, economies in, 216

, scientific development of, 127

Alcohol, abandonment of, 36

and the law, 242

and crime, 244

Alphabet, the, 42
Anaesthetics, 120
Animal food, abandonment of, 34,

126

Antisepsis and asepsis, 10
Arboriculture, 217
Architecture, 194
Argon, n, 290
Art, A.D. 2000, 196
Atheism, 177

B

BACILLARY diseases, destruction of,
123

Ballot, the (its inadequacy), 262

Bathing, A.D. 2000, 305,

Bedroom, the, A.D, 2000, 25

Bellamy, Edward, 5

Bible, inspiration of the, 176

Birth-rate, the (its artificial restric-
tion), 14

Bread, wholemeal, 34

Buildings, high, 17

CALCULATING machines, 45
Canada (its future), 97
Casabianca, 155
Cereals, 35

Climate, artificial manipulation of,
128

Clothes, A.D. 2000, 294.
Coal (its utilisation), 7

, exhaustion of, 104

Combination, voluntary, as a mode

of self-government, 210
Comte, Auguste, 293
Conscience, public, 185
Cooper, E. H. (The Twentieth

Centtiry Child), 145, 150, note
Co-operation, 51
Cooking, 22
Crime and heredity, 251
— and poverty, 244

elimination, 247

Criminal appeals (in law), 257

D

Daily Telegraph, the, 84
Darwin, Charles, 179
Davy, Sir Humphry, 6
Diplomacy, A.D. 2000, 269
Domestic servants, 18, 24
Drainage, 25, note, 127

E

ECONOMY in agriculture, 215

, relation of prices to, 205

in use of wood, 215

Edison, T. A., 291
Education, A.D. 2000, apparatus of,
140

. art in, 171

, books in, 163

by pleasure, 149

, corporal punishment in, 144

, crime in relation to, 234

, history in, 170

, rational obedience in, 154

3°9

310

INDEX

Education, languages in, 164, 166

, literature in, 171

, mathematics in, 163

, mixed (of boys and girls), 146

, phonograph in, 141, 303, note

, physical science in, 161

, punishments in, 158

, specialised, 162

, Spencer on, 151 note

Education, Intellectual ', Moral and
Physical (H. Spencer), 151, note
Electricity, the end of its age, 1 1

, wireless transmission of, 1 14

Eton, punishments at, 144

Euclid, 157, 158

Evolution (the term), 37, note

FASHION, A. D. 2000, 299
Flying-machines, 27, 55
Foods, vegetable, 33
Freight transportation, 46
Furniture, A.D. 2000, 302

GAMES in education, 143
Gases, liquefied, as a source of
power, 116

H

HANDICRAFTS, revival of, 50
Horse traffic (its abolition), 22
House construction, 20

cleaning, 21

Huxley, Thomas H., 6, 179
Hydrogen, uses of, 9, 102
Hypnotism, 131

ID/EOGRAPHY, Chinese, 166, note

JOURNALISM and literature, 92
Jury, trial by, 257

K

KELVIN. Lord, 108
Kipling, Rudyard, 147
Kitchen, the, A.U. 2000, 22

LAMB, Charles, 158

Land tenure, 99, 259

Lang, Andrew, 123, note, 164, note,

168

Language, a "universal," 165
Languages, modern, 19
Literature, A.D. 2000, 193, 198

and journalism, 92

Latey, John, 144

Law, the, A.D. 2000, 233

, alcohol and, 241

, changes in, necessitated

by new conditions, 240
, cost of civil suits to be

borne by Government,

253

, education and, 234

, marriage and, 278

, methods of legislation,

259

, "new offences" and, 234

, penology and, 249

, poverty and, 244

, protective enactments in-
jurious where avoid-
able, 239

, protecting property,. 245

, the person, 246

, trial by jury, 257

Legislation, reform of, 266

M

MACAULAY, Lord, 193
Manures (see Agriculture), 127
Marriage, law of, A. D. 2000, 278
Medicine, progress of, 119
Memory (children's), 151
Merchandise Marks Act, 289
Middleman, the, 88
Morality and education, 154

as affected by education, 136,

139*235.

as affected by progress, 64

, improving tendency of, 307

INDEX

311

Morality, progress of, 136
Morris, William, 5
Motor-cars, slot- worked, 31
Music, A.D. 2000, 58, 201

, Oriental, 201

Musician, the (his art), 62

N

NAPOLEON, 4

Newspapers, advertisements in, 83

— , editorship of, 68

— , A.D. 2000, how illustrated, 80

, language of, 82

, how printed, 79

OCEAN cities, 98

and the anhydrator, 99

, urban traffic in, 98

Oersted, 117

Oxygen, uses of, 9, 26, 102

Ozone and ozonators, 27

PAYN, James, 144

Parliament, reform of, 260

Penology, principles of, in A.D.
2000, 249

Philosophy, A.D. 2000, 109

Phonograph, the, 40

in education, 141, 303, note

, the printing, 41

Photography, chromatic, 59

Plato, 188

Plumbers (their technical educa-
tion), 25

Poetry of the future, 193

Post Office, the, 276

in A.D. 2000, 44

Power, economy of, 212

Prayer in A.D. 2000, 190

Press, freedom of the (its possible
restriction), 247

Prices, relation of, and economy,
205

significance of, 32

Progress, rate of, i, 135, 288

Psychical faculties, development

of, 65, 130

Punishment, capital, 237, 257
Punishments, violent, will be

abandoned, 238 (see Penology)

R

RADIATION in therapeutics, 1 19

Radium, II, 108, Il8

Railway transport, 27

Recent Development of Physical

Science (Whetham), 116, note
Referendum, 265
Religion, A.D. 2000, 175

, education and, 182

, high civilisation and, 175

, indifference towards, 181

, morality and, 186

, mysticism and, 186, 188

, "natural," 188

, philosophy and, 187

Review of Reviews, the, 71
Roadways, moving, 30

S

SAHARA, desert of, proposal to flood,

95

Saleeby, Dr. C. W., 108, 123,
note

Salpetriere Hospital, 130

Scott, Sir Walter, 4

Sculpture, A.D. 2OOO, 198

Sea air, 26

, the, mineral wealth of, 101

, utilisation of, 95

Shakespeare, 186

Ships, A.D. 2000, 30

Shorter, Clement K., 144

Siberia (its future), 93

Socialism, 51, 206, 210, 273

Society, gradual progress of, 287

Socrates, 186

Spencer, Herbert, 18, 146, note, 188,
287, 292

Sports, athletic, 54

State, the, usurpation of wrong
functions by, 74, 273 (see Social-
ism)

Steam-engine, the (its imperfec-
tions), 7

Suburbs, 15

312

INDEX

TALKING-MACHINES (see Phono-
graph), 61

Teleautoscope, the (an instrument
for seeing by electricity), 43

Telephones, recording, 39

Telephony, wireless, 38

Theatre, the, 60

Times, The, 68, 71, 84

Tobacco, 214

Trade, retail (its development and
changes), 86

Traill, H. D., 169

Transmutation of matter, 119

Travel, pleasures of, 57

Tyndall, John, 151, note

U

UNEMPLOYED, problem of the, 48

VACUUM, cleaning by, 21
Vice, effect of progress on, 64

W

WAGES, 33

and co-operation, 51

War, abolition of, predicted, 76

correspondence, 74, note, 76,

78, note

, its supposed advantages dis-
cussed, 226
Waste by alcohol, 215

by animal food, 215

, illness regarded as a, 214

, sewage disposal a, 215

, war as a, 219 (see Economy)

Water, electrolysis of, 8
Weaklings, perpetuation of, 125
Wealth, limitation of, 49
Wellington, 5
Wells, H. G., 5, 20
Whetham, W. C., 116, note
Woman (her political influence), 283

(her political influence in

America), 284

(her political influence in New

Zealand), 284

, position of, A.D. 2000, 283,

(see Law and Marriage)
Workmen, condition of, 52
, trains for, 15

THE END

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